European Space Agency's Envisat captures breath of volcano
... Officials raised the alert to the highest level on Tuesday after the volcano, located in the eastern province of North Maluku, started spitting out flaming material, indicating magma was approaching the craters surface making an eruption more likely, Saut Simatupang of Indonesia's Vulcanological Survey told Reuters ne...First greenhouse gas animations produced using Envisat SCIAMACHY data
... The importance of cutting emissions from these 'anthropogenic', or manmade, gases has been highlighted recently with European Union leaders endorsing binding targets to cut greenhouse gases by at least 20 percent from 1990 levels by 2020. Further illustrating the urgency to combat global warming, Britain became the fir...ESA donates mosaic of global images taken by Envisat to United Nations
The European Space Agency today donated a composite satellite image of global land cover provided by its Envisat satellite to the United Nations in Geneva, as a testimony to the current state of our planet, to be handed down to future generations.... The image will be exhibited permanently in the new access building by the Pregny gate in the Palais des Nations compound. Mr Sergei Ordzhonikidze,...Envisat making first direct measurements of ocean surface velocities
For more than a decade space-based radar instruments have been routinely observing ocean surface phenomena including wind, waves, oil slicks, even the eyes of hurricanes. Now employing the same principle as police speed guns satellite radar has also begun to enable direct measurements of the speed of the moving ocean surface itself....... The oceans that cover 71% of the Earth's surface are con...Envisat altimeter watches Pacific for cold tongue of La Niña
Satellite measurements of a steep difference in sea surface height between the western and eastern tropical Pacific support predictions that a La Nia event is in the offing. El Nio's chillier sister, La Nia is linked to opposing but equally wide-ranging shifts in weather patterns....... Hundreds of years ago fishermen off the west coast of Peru noted how periodically around Christmas time the wat...Envisat sees smoke from Europe's worst peacetime fire
London is completely blanketed by the black plume of smoke from Europe's worst peacetime fire in this Envisat image, taken within five hours of the blaze beginning....... This image was acquired at 10:45 GMT on Sunday morning by the Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS), one of ten instruments aboard Envisat, Europe's largest satellite for environmental monitoring. This Reduced Resolutio...Breath of the dragon: ERS-2 and Envisat reveal impact of economic growth on China's air quality
China's spectacular economic growth during the last decade has brought many benefits and some challenges. Global atmospheric mapping of nitrogen dioxide pollution performed by ERS-2's GOME and Envisat's SCIAMACHY reveals the world's largest amount of NO2 hanging above Beijing and northeast China, as reported in Nature this week....... As part of ESA's Dragon Programme, European and Chinese resea...China's rainy season has led to serious flooding in the north-east and south of the country. A joint Chinese-European team is gathering Envisat radar imagery of the developing situation to give the authorities a way to swiftly assess affected areas and plan their responses....... Summer flooding is nothing new in these regions of the People's Republic of China (PRC), though this year it is provin...