Remote sensing data

other
One that has not gone up yet: SWOT

ESA
ESA is a very big engine and it is tricky to find what you are actually looking for or what you need but there is lots:

The following link is a shortcut to ESA's 'Resources' page that includes upcoming workshops, the ESA library, data samples and archives, and probably most useful for anyone working with ESA data, there are ESA-tailored software tools that run free-of-charge on Windows, linux and also MacOS (although mac versions are usually appearing a bit later than the other two!): http://earth.esa.int/resources/ P.S. I attended an ESA Land Training course in Lisbon in September 2007 on Flooding/Soil moisture and Forests and have lots of lecture notes on ASAR, ALOS and how to use these data with the BEST, BEAM and POLSARPRO packages (I have actually worked with an ALOS quadpol for tree height and soil moisture retrieval: amazing data!). If you want any of these notes or some help, just email me (guy.schumann@bristol.ac.uk) and I'll try to help! There is a useful tool from the ESA website to search for available images (does ENVISAT and others):

http://eoli.esa.int/

To access online (last 7-10 days) data and submit CAT-1 (free data) proposals for projects:

http://earth.esa.int/dataproducts/accessingeodata/

To answer third party mission (from non-ESA satellites) calls: http://eopi.esa.int/esa/esa?type=10&cmd=aolist, and go to the 'TPM' link to the left of the page,

and AO (Announcement of Opportunities) calls: http://eopi.esa.int/esa/esa?type=10&cmd=aolist

ESA conferences and workshops
Anyone interested in this year's (2008) ESA summer school in August (4-14) at the ESRIN centre in Italy? Topic: Data assimilation, monitoring and modelling the Earth System. Have a look at: http://envisat.esa.int/envschool/

meteosat
The channels of SEVERI on board meteosat-8 (spectral band / μm)

(from http://las.physik.uni-oldenburg.de/eProceedings/vol05_1/05_1_de-ruyter1.pdf)

Envisat altimeter
Some information that may make life easier when dealing with ESA's altimeter N1 files:


 * ESA's Basic Radar Altimeter Toolbox provides a set of tools and an interface for extracting data from the original N1 files. The interface is broken on recent linux versions due to obsolete dependencies but the command line tools work.


 * The XY extraction utility (BratCreateZFXY) does not seem capable of extracting the original data directly. It requires a predefined raster size and automatically interpolates before exporting.


 * BratCreateYFX extracts the measurements in the original resolution. However it only includes one dimension so you have to add the other one manually as a dataset. Something like this in the parameter file:

# longitude X=lon X_NAME=X X_TYPE=Longitude X_UNIT=degrees_east X_TITLE=X # latitude FIELD=lat FIELD_NAME=Y FIELD_TYPE=Data FIELD_UNIT=count FIELD_TITLE=Y # data of interest follow FIELD=alt_cog_ellip FIELD_NAME=alt_cog_ellip FIELD_TYPE=Data FIELD_UNIT=mm FIELD_TITLE=alt_cog_ellip


 * Extracting many fields from many files is much easier using the command line tools and a batch script.

statistical
singular vector decomposition

Bretherton CS, Smith C, Wallace JM. 1992. An intercomparison of methods for finding coupled patterns in climate data. Journal of Wilks DS. 1995. Statistical Methods in the Atmospheric Sciences. Climate 5: 541–560