MERIS captures all of Europe from orbit
See the face of Europe from space – with the entire continent covered in consistent detail. This set of true-colour Envisat satellite mosaics depicts the ten newest members of the European Union as well as ESAs 15 current member states and two pending accessions of Greece and Luxembourg.
The crowning mosaic in the series represents approximately 1.6 million square kilometres of European territory at 300-metre resolution. All the mosaics were produced using the Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) instrument on ESAs Envisat environmental satellite, working in full resolution mode. The Innsbruck-based company GeoVille produced the mosaics for ESA. They are made up of around 160 separate MERIS images.
“Most of the images are taken in the time period between May to August 2003, and we started to order images around December of that year,” explains Frederic Petrini of Geoville. “We finished the first part of the project eight months later, and it took us another two months to finish the all-Europe mosaic.”
Once the images are ordered they were georeferenced, then mosaicked together. A colour match is run and irregularities such as clouds had to be corrected for. Millions of clouds were masked and substituted with actual data.
The mosaic scale is constant, so it needs more than six images to cover the whole of Germany while small countries like Luxembourg can be covered by only one image.
“I envisage that MERIS mosaics like this one will in future be produced more frequently to identify changes happening on our planet,” adds GeoVilles Christian Hoffman. “It is an excellent sensor to make the link between higher resolution data used for hotspot monitoring and coarser resolution data used so far for global monitoring.”
The Europe mosaic can also be browsed at full resolution using the ESRIN Web Map Server at the link on the right navigation bar.
Media Contact
All latest news from the category: Earth Sciences
Earth Sciences (also referred to as Geosciences), which deals with basic issues surrounding our planet, plays a vital role in the area of energy and raw materials supply.
Earth Sciences comprises subjects such as geology, geography, geological informatics, paleontology, mineralogy, petrography, crystallography, geophysics, geodesy, glaciology, cartography, photogrammetry, meteorology and seismology, early-warning systems, earthquake research and polar research.
Newest articles
New anti-cancer agent works without oxygen
Why tumors shrink but don’t disappear. “As tumors grow very quickly, consume a lot of oxygen and their vascular growth can’t necessarily keep pace, they often contain areas that are…
First blueprint of the human spliceosome revealed
Researchers detail the inner workings of the most complex and intricate molecular machine in human biology. Researchers at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona have created the first…
A paper-aluminum combo for strong, sustainable packaging
Takeout containers get your favorite noodles from the restaurant to your dining table (or couch) without incident, but they are nearly impossible to recycle if they are made from foil-lined…