2nd ESA Advanced Training Course on Ocean Remote Sensing 2009

The European Space Agency is organizing a series of regular advanced thematic training courses devoted to the exploitation of Earth Observation data from ESA and Third Party Mission instruments for ocean, land and atmosphere applications.

These trainings are held yearly and are hosted in European Universities and Research institutions, with the host country rotating among the ESA Member States.

In 2009 as part of this initiative, ESA organised a 2nd Advanced Training Course on Ocean Remote Sensing, hosted by the NERSC and VilVite Science Centre in Bergen, Norway.

Objectives
The specific objectives of the advanced ocean training course were to:

• To stimulate and support the exploitation of ESA Earth Observation remote sensing data for ocean applications
• To introduce available software tools and methods for the exploitation of these data
• To train the next generation of European and Canadian Principal Investigators (PIs)

Participation
As an advanced training course, it was targeted to the European, ESA Member state and Canadian research and development community, in particular post-doc researchers as well as masters and PhD students.

Course Contents
This advanced training course focused on ocean remote sensing theory and applications. It addressed both Radar and Optical/Thermal remote sensing and focused on the following main topics:

• SAR principles, data products and applications including oil spill and ship detection, wave and wind field retrievals, shallow water bottom bathymetry, oceanic fronts and eddies detection, and sea ice monitoring
• MERIS ocean colour principles, atmospheric correction and water constituents retrieval algorithms, products and applications
• AATSR principles, atmospheric correction algorithms, comparison of microwave and infrared techniques for SST measurements, AATSR applications for oceanography
• RA principles, atmospheric and geophysical corrections, algorithm for sea level, wave height and wind observations, and applications relevant for large scale and coastal oceanography
• Synergy of data from different satellite sensors

The training course included formal lectures by leading scientists as well as hands-on computing exercises exposing students to remote sensing applications. Practicals used specific software tools for the exploitation of EO data from the ASAR, RA, MERIS, and AATSR instruments onboard Envisat.

Access here below the full programme.