The paper reports the assessment of CFC-11 abundances in the stratosphere obtained using MIPAS observations in the first two years of operation. The retrieval of CFC-11 abundances from the measured radiances is obtained using an approximated and fast forward model. Even if yet limited to the two year for which consolidated MIPAS data are available, the analysis provides detailed information on ...

The Met Office routinely runs a global spectral wave model providing analyses and forecasts of sea state on a grid spacing of approximately 60 km. The modelled two-dimensional wave energy spectra are compared with the Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) Envisat satellite observations on a daily basis. Comparisons are also made with frequency ocean wave energy spectra observed by a moored b...

ollowing the successful Seasat project in 1978, the European Space Agency used advanced microwave radar techniques on the European Remote Sensing satellites ERS-1 (1991) and ERS-2 (1995) to provide global and repetitive observations, irrespective of cloud or sunlight conditions, for the scientific study of the Earth’s environment. The ERS synthetic aperture radars (SARs) demonstrated for the fi...

The paper describes a new retrieval technique for analysing MIPAS spectra based on (a) using a spectrally-averaged radiance, effectively synthesising a filter radiometer, and (b) using a band-averaged forward model, both of which represent significant differences from the approaches used by other groups (ie using measurements at their full spectral sampling and monochromatic forward models). Th...

Two-dimensional ocean wave spectra are measured from ENVISAT ASAR wave mode cross spectra on a global scale. The measurement is performed using a parametric retrieval scheme, which makes use of prior information taken from numerical wave models. The Partition Rescale and Shift algorithm (PARSA) is based on a partitioning technique, which splits an a prior wave spectrum into its wave system comp...

The aim of this paper is to assess the change detector r specifically elaborated to analyse ENVISAT ASAR Wide Swath Mode (WSM) data pairs for plain flood changes detection. The algorithm relies on an enhanced ratio for strong changes over large homogeneous and flat areas combined with a ratio calculated from the two raw images. The change detection assessment was conducted on 14 image pairs exp...

Since its launch in March 2002, the highly successful ENVISAT mission has provided valuable support to Europe’s Earth Observation research giving long term continuity of science return and contributed to several disaster monitoring campaigns. This paper presents the operational status of the Envisat payload, comprised of 10 multi-disciplinary earth observation instruments, after more than five ...

A parametric algorithm is presented to estimate two-dimensional ocean wave spectra from ENVISAT ASAR wave mode data on a global scale. The retrieval scheme makes use of prior information taken from numerical wave models. The Partition Rescale and Shift algorithm (PARSA) is based on a partitioning technique, which splits an a priori wave spectrum into its wave system components. Integral paramet...

During ERS-1 and ERS-2 missions, the application of synthetic aperture radar interferometry (InSAR) become known as a very important method for topographic mapping and high accuracy surface displacement measurements. Further investigations, however, showed that expected accuracy couldn’t be achieved. It appeared that radiowave propagation through the atmosphere causes significant distortion to ...