Best wishes for 2020 !

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This is the eighth time this blog wishes you a Happy New Year! We send you and your loved ones our best wishes for personal, family and professional happiness for the year 2020.

On our program for this new year:

• the beginning, at last, of the ortho-rectification with ground control points of the Sentinel-2 data. Originally planned 1 year after the launch of Sentinel-2A, it has only been announced, for the last 6 months, to start within 3 months (yes, this sentence may need to be read twice).
• The Sentinel-2C satellite is expected to be almost ready later this year, and this will be an opportunity to call for an early launch to improve the system’s revisit frequency. It would be very useful, especially in periods of relatively cloudy weather, to have three passes every 10 days.
• Version 4 of MAJA will enter into service, and with it, finally, the processing of data with the types of aerosols from CAMS.
  
  On the research side, we will work on modelling and improving the correction of adjacency effects, and we will try to better understand what causes the appearance of tile limits observed on the mosaics of our Level 3A products.
• We will install, on the Lamasquère site, a ROSAS surface reflectance measuring station, similar to those at La Crau and Gobabeb, to measure the accuracy of Level 2A products in real and difficult conditions on sites that are not entirely uniform and have variable reflectances over time.
• The B,C,D phase of the Trishna satellite (Thermal Infrared at 60m resolution) starts. The French-Indian mission (CNES, ISRO), should be launched in 2024 or 2025.
• We will start the production of the COSIMS project of the European Environment Agency, to follow, with Sentinel-2, the snow cover of Europe. The project is led by Magellium and CESBIO’s methods (MAJA and LIS) will be used.
• 2020 will also be a year of transition of the CESBIO management, during which Mehrez Zribi will gradually replace Laurent Polidori as  director, and where I will try to replace Mehrez as « Observation System » team leader. Gilles Boulet will still lead the modelling team. Three transversal thematic axes will be created, devoted to water (Anim. Olivier Merlin), eco-agrosystems (Anim. Eric Ceschia) and regional vegetation dynamics (Anim. Lionel Jarlan). We will also have two assistant directors, Valérie Démarez and Lionel Jarlan.
  
  At CNES, the development of the hydrological treatment centre project (Hysope-2) should begin. In the framework of Theia and in anticipation of the launch of the NASA/CNES SWOT satellite, HYSOPE 2 should notably generalize a large part of the MUSCATE treatments to Europe and Africa at least, hopefully to the world.

And of course :

• we will continue the animation of this blog and try to recruit new editors to assist the two chief editors, O.H. and S.G. before they start rambling too much (if it’s not already too late …) ! If you are a user of Earth observation time series, you will certainly have some interesting things to tell in this blog. Please contact us!