29 May 2020On May 20, 2020, tropical cyclone Amphan made landfall on the northeast coast of India and the south coast of Bangladesh. According to the Indian Meteorological Service, it is one of the worst storms in the region in the last 20 years. More than three million people were taken to emergency shelters. This is a particular challenge due to the corona pandemic.
27 May 2020Starting in May 2020, the imaging spectrometer DESIS on the ISS (International Space Station) will additionally record data in preparation for the hyperspectral Copernicus mission CHIME.
26 May 2020Watching the animation of the annual reopening of the Ozone hole in the austral spring reminds us to the damage mankind has caused to our planet’s atmosphere through the industrial release of chlorofluorocarbons in the past. This visualization has been created at DLR from a 25 years long European satellite data series from Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment (GOME) type instruments which are hosted in the archives of EOC. The quarter-of-a-century long data-time-series is now continued by a new satellite starting to deliver data.
25 May 2020The COPERNICUS initiative of the European Union (EU) and the European Space Agency (ESA) is aimed at developing remote-sensing based information products and services. This requires establishing validation sites that provide ground truth data. For 20 years DLR has operated the DEMMIN remote sensing validation site.
06 May 2020In May 2020 three “International Future Labs for Artificial Intelligence”, the outcome of a competition launched by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), will begin work. One of them is the Future Lab ‘Artificial Intelligence for Earth Observation: Reasoning, Uncertainties, Ethics and Beyond’ (AI4EO), led by Munich Technical University (TUM) in collaboration with the DLR Earth Observation Center. It will be concerned with the development of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in earth observation.
27 April 2020Some 4 billion people are currently affected by lockdown measures connected with the coronavirus pandemic. It is therefore not surprising that monitoring by Europe's Sentinel 5P satellite reveals a strong decrease in air pollution globally. Especially nitrogen dioxide (NO2) levels are a good indicator of air contamination caused by industrial production and road traffic.