Accurate information about the environmental is crucial. It helps to understand how our planet and climate are changing, the role human activity play in these changes and how this affects our daily lives. Responding to these challenges, the EU and ESA have developed an Earth observation programme called Copernicus, formerly known as Global Monitoring for Environment and Security, – a programme that becomes operational with the launch of Sentinel-1A.
Tag: GMES
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ESA Euronews: Copernicus offers a flood of disaster data
The recent floods in the UK saw a lot of the management of that disaster made possible by using information from satellites. But how? In this edition of Space we find out.
Flooding affects thousands of people every year across Europe, and this year one of them just happened to be a flood scientist – Spanish Research Fellow at Reading University in England, Javier García-Pintado.
His back garden looks onto the Thames, he explains: “This is the bank of the Thames, and this areas was severely affected by the recent flooding. Specifically in this little bit of land we are a tiny bit higher, and we didn’t have any problems, but our neighbours around here certainly did.”
García-Pintado knew his young family was safe at home, because he could count on his expert knowledge; his day job is using satellite data to improve flood models.
“As hydrologists we were pretty confident that this property wouldn’t have a problem, and we told our neighbours,” he told euronews.
Not everyone has a neighbour as knowledgeable as Javier, nor were they as lucky.
The whole area west of London was affected as England and Wales lived through their wettest winter in almost 250 years.
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Earth from Space: The future of Earth observation
Earth from Space is presented by Kelsea Brennan-Wessels from the ESA Web-TV virtual studios.
In the nineteenth edition we look at an example of what a high-resolution image could look like from the future Sentinel-2 mission — envisaged for launch next year. The mockup was constructed using 82 images from the German RapidEye satellites.