21 June 2022 Climate change represents one of the greatest challenges of our time. A significant reduction in the emission of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane is required to limit the temperature increase. Satellites can continuously and impartially monitor progress in the struggle against global warming. In particular, the monitoring of power plants, industrial facilities and coal mines is crucial since they emit large quantities of these harmful greenhouse gases. However, until now the spatial resolution of the available instruments was inadequate for detecting the contributions made by the individual actors responsible.
14 June 2022Fifteen years – who would have thought it? The German radar satellite TerraSAR-X, which was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 08:14 local time on 15 June 2007, was originally designed to last five and a half years – until the end of 2012. It has been delivering data of outstanding quality ever since, regardless of weather conditions, cloud cover and daylight levels. The scientific mission for TerraSAR-X and the satellite itself are operated by the German Aerospace Center
30 May 2022 Dr. Homa Ansari, Dr. Francesco de Zan and Mr. Alessandro Parizzi were awarded the DLR-Science Price 2021 for their work, “Study of Systematic Bias in Measuring Surface Deformation with SAR Interferometry”, which was published in 2020 in IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing. The outstanding scientific and technological achievements of these researchers at EOC could thereby be honoured.
25 May 2022The first products of the new European Ground Motion Service (EGMS), an EU-financed Copernicus Land Monitoring Service, have been published. The IWAP interferometry processor developed at EOC computes highly precise ground motion maps from radar satellite data. After assessing years of time series and correcting for atmospheric effects, Earth’s ground displacement can be determined down to the millimetre. The DLR processor has been used since 2017, also for the ground movement service of the Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources (BGR).
11 May 2022Traffic emissions endanger our health. Especially at heavy traffic locations, nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and particulate matter limits are often exceeded. EOC researchers and partners have therefore derived from satellite data ground concentrations of these air pollutants in the S-VELD project and analysed their sources and temporal distribution.