Beirut explosion before and after 8 August 2020
A devastating explosion in Beirut on 4 August has killed at least 200 people and injured around 5,000 others. The disaster was preceded by a large fire at the Port of Beirut, on the city’s northern Mediterranean coast, later there was a colossal explosion that sent a mushroom cloud into the air and a supersonic blast
‘BLACK LIVES MATTER’ from space
The Black Rock desert is the bed of a large lake that dried up thousands of years ago, by the length of about 130km and located in the northwest of Nevada, in the United States. The flatness of the Black Rock Desert’s lake bed surface has led to the area’s use as a proving ground
[Top view] Wuhan
The images below represent Wuhan captured with SAR Copernicus Sentinel-1 and optical Copernicus Sentinel-2. Wuhan sits at the confluence of the Han River flowing into the Yangtze River at the East of the Jianghan Plain. The metropolitan area consists of three centers (Wuchang, Hankou and Hanyang) commonly called “Three Towns of Wuhan”. The name Wuhan is obtained by combining
Carbon Monoxide
Carbon Monoxide is a gas that can be found in our Atmosphere and its presence is mainly due to the burning of fossils fuels and biomass (e.g forest or bushfires) and human activities in general. It is considered a pollutant species of the atmosphere and in this respect the carbon monoxide distribution is an index
Aerosols
In the frame of air quality monitoring the Copernicus Sentinel-5p mission has been designed to identify the concentration of several atmospheric compounds and species in our atmosphere: one of those data is the Ultraviolet Aerosol Indexes (UVAI). Aerosols are a suspension of fine solid particles or liquid droplets, in air or another gas, and can
Land Surface Temperature
“Land Surface Temperature (LST) is the radiative skin temperature of the land derived from solar radiation. It is a basic determinant of the terrestrial thermal behaviour, as it controls the effective radiating temperature of the Earth’s surface” [1]. LST is linked to several aspects of the geoscience and in this respect the understanding of its
Formaldehyde
Formaldehyde is an organic compound widely used in many industrial applications, such as the manufacturing of resins, production of disinfectants and biocides or like a tissue fixative. It is present in our atmosphere as a gas and its distribution in the air is not only linked to man-made sources (combustion of fuel, traffic, emission from
The Ozone Hole
All life on Earth depends on the existence of a thin shield of a poisonous gas high in the atmosphere: the ozone layer. (Ozone Secretariat, UNEP, “Action on Ozone”) The ozone layer is a region of our atmosphere widely known for absorbing a large part of the direct dangerous ultraviolet radiation coming from the Sun. Indeed
Nitrogen Dioxide Pollution
Nitrogen Dioxide is one of the atmospheric gas species retrieved from the data acquired by Sentinel-5P multispectral imaging spectrometer: TROPOMI. Sentinel-5P is the umpteenth spacecraft belonging the the Sentinels constellations and conceived in the framework of the Copernicus Programme. The main goal of this mission is to perform atmospheric measurements with high spatio-temporal resolution, to be used
Mappamondo: Copernicus Natural Color World
Since we started to publish Sentinel-3 Level 2 world maps via our EO browser we took the challenge to process a land worldwide cloud free image of the Earth with an RGB natural colour composition. Indeed with a proper tailoring of our processors in order to handle the instruments radiances and cloud masks, using several months