Earth’s oceans help to slow global warming by absorbing carbon from our atmosphere – but fully observing this crucial process in the upper ocean and lower atmosphere is difficult, as measurements are taken not where it occurs, the sea surface, but several metres below. New research uses data from ESA, NASA and NOAA satellites to …
Registration is open as from today for the Horizon 2020 European Green Deal Call, a €1 billion call for research and innovation projects that respond to the climate crisis and help protect Europe’s unique ecosystems and biodiversity. Ten areas will be covered. Eight thematic areas reflecting the key work streams of the European Green Deal: Increasing …
On 19 August 2020, the world’s largest and longest polar research expedition – known as MOSAiC – reached the North Pole after making an unplanned detour owing to lighter-than-usual sea ice conditions. The expedition is now entering its final stage, during which researchers will study the last piece of the Arctic puzzle: the growth of …
A recent report confirms that ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, whose mass-loss rates have been rapidly increasing, are matching the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s worst-case sea-level rise scenarios. Read the full story.
The IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in Changing Climate (2019) includes “permafrost carbon and greenhouse gas emissions” as one of the cases characterised by deep uncertainty. The report states that even if there is a very high confidence that “permafrost temperatures have increased to record high levels including the recent increase by …
The overarching goal of the EO AFRICA RD Facility is to foster an African-European RD collaboration enabling an active research community and creative innovation processes for a continuous development of EO capabilities in Africa. The RD Facility will identify African EO research challenges, launch research calls, leverage modern cloud computing development tools and support a …
While carbon dioxide is more abundant in the atmosphere and therefore more commonly associated with global warming, methane is around 30 times more potent as a heat-trapping gas. Given its importance, Canadian company GHGSat have worked in collaboration with the Sentinel-5P team at SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research to investigate hotspots of methane emissions …
In February 2020, ESA (Directorate of Earth Observation Programmes – EOP) and EC (Directorate-General for Research and Innovation – R&I) launched a joint Earth System Science Initiative, formalised with the signature of a working arrangement between both institutions. The initiative aims at joining forces to advance Earth System Science and provide a coordinated response to …
Trace gases are produced and destructed by physical, biological and chemical processes. This natural cycle has been perturbed over the past decades by the global population increase and by the related boost of anthropogenic activities. The composition of the atmosphere is undergoing major and rapid changes with significant impacts on a global scale, affecting the …
