Mission to Planet Earth

The European Space Agency has launched a constellation of earth observation satellites – the Sentinel programme – and made all data freely available. In this talk, I will show you how we use the active radar (Sentinel-1) and visible and near infrared (Sentinel-2) platforms to map the characteristic changes throughout a growing season at a hops vineyard in the West Midlands.

Air pollution is challenging to monitor on the ground, in particular in hard-to-reach parts of the world. Instruments in space offer a unique opportunity to address these data gaps. In this talk I will demonstrate how my research group and others in the field use instruments on-board NASA and European Space Agency (ESA) satellites to estimate how polluted the world is, identify super emitters, and evaluate the success (or failure) of air quality policy.

Whilst remote sensing from satellites is a wonderful way to learn about the Earth’s atmosphere on a global scale, there is still plenty to be learned by using similar techniques from aircraft and the ground. In this talk I will discuss the instruments I use for measuring greenhouse gases, and share some of my experiences of getting my hands dirty operating this equipment in the field.