In English

Global sea ice area : a scary plot

When I say « a scary plot », I don’t mean a Chinese plot aimed at confusing some naive North Americans, it just mean a figure (an American one, by the way, made with data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center) that provides the total sea ice area over the globe. And this figure is […]

15.01.2017

Pine Island Glacier rift: 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong

The rift of Pine Island glacier was captured by Sentinel-2A several times since Sentinel-2A is watching Antarctica. However I was not sure if the crack was growing by looking at the images only.

09.01.2017

Pine Island Glacier rift

The rift of Pine Island Glacier’s floating tongue is a cause of concern among glaciologists because it suggests that this part of the ice shelf is not stable and may collapse in the future. As explained in this EOS article [1] Rifts usually form at the sides of an ice shelf where the ice is […]

06.01.2017

White Christmas in Aleppo

This is a Sentinel-2A image of Aleppo on Dec 22, showing some snow through the clouds. I do not know if this sunny interval lasted a long time, and I wonder if the inhabitants of Aleppo had wished snow for Christmas. I walked through the streets of Aleppo in July 2003 at the end of […]

27.12.2016

The importance of a good cloud mask for the operational use of Sentinel-2 data

=> The above plot shows the TOA reflectance time series gathered by Sentinel-2 over a pixel chosen randomly in a tile in the centre of France (tile 31TDK, pixel 3000-7000), from L1C products.  Looking at the time series, it is rather difficult to tell what kind of surface was observed, even if a vegetation cycle […]

16.12.2016

(At last !) Automated download of Sentinel-2A Level 2A products from Theia

=> The production of Sentinel-2 L2A data is on-going at CNES THEIA, but it is still a little slower than expected. We had one fast day on which the exploitation team managed to process 600 tiles, but the production has often been slower as we needed to solve a few glitches, and as the whole […]

13.12.2016

Sentinel-2A now watching Antarctica

Sentinel-2A was launched on 23-July-2015 but the routine operations started in July 2016 after the ramp-up phase [1]. Now with the onset of the austral summer, the first Sentinel-2A images of Antarctica are getting available (except for Dome C, which is a calibration site).  

06.12.2016

Sentinel-2 spots best-kept secret in corporate Japan

Today for lunch I went to a Japanese restaurant near the university with my wife and our oldest son. We discreetly debated whether the owners were actually Japanese because we could recognize some words in Chinese when they were speaking. However, in the main room there was a tapestry of the majestic snow-capped Mount Fuji, […]

29.11.2016

Sentinel-2 to monitor forest fires in Siberia?

At the beginning of summer, a colleague in Igarka (Maxime Deschuyteneer ?) informed me on 20th of July that a forest fire up to the city was responsible, according to him, of “a small greenhouse effect that make you cough”…Indeed, forest fires are recurring problems in Central Siberia, mainly during June and July because of […]

17.11.2016

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