Level-2 News

Sentinel-1D goes live: a milestone for Europe’s radar mission [link]
"The Copernicus Sentinel-1D satellite, launched last November, is now fully operational after successfully completing its critical in-orbit commissioning phase.

With all four Sentinel-1 satellites having now been deployed, this achievement marks a major milestone for this flagship radar mission – a journey that began more than a decade ago and that has helped pave the way for the future of Earth observation."

Italy’s Earth monitoring programme reaches new milestone [link]
"Italy’s IRIDE Earth observation programme has added seven more satellites to its Hawk for Earth Observation (HEO) constellation, enhancing the strategic data it provides for Italy’s environmental, emergency and security services."

ECMWF Launches DestinE ML Earth System Components Page [link]
ECMWF has launched a new page on machine-learning Earth system components developed within the European Commission’s Destination Earth initiative, covering prototype AI-based models for land surface, hydrology, waves, sea ice, and ocean conditions.

ML Earth System Components [link]

SpaceX launches South Korean Earth observation satellite, plus 44 more payloads on midnight Falcon 9 rideshare mission [link]
SpaceX launched South Korea’s CAS500-2 precision Earth-observation satellite and 44 additional rideshare payloads on a Falcon 9 from Vandenberg, with the mission also carrying several other EO satellites from Argotec, Loft Orbital/EarthDaily Analytics, Planet Labs, and GalaxEye.

GMV to Lead Mission Planning for ESA’s Next-Generation Copernicus Expansion [link]
GMV has been selected by ESA to lead the development and long-term maintenance of mission-planning functions for the Copernicus expansion missions, including CRISTAL and ROSE-L, helping coordinate what future Sentinel missions observe, when they acquire data, and how that data is downloaded.

NGA Awards Vantor $70M Option Year Contract to Operate and Enhance Government’s Primary Commercial GEOINT Platform [link]
NGA has awarded Vantor a $70 million Option Year 1 contract under the G-EGD program to operate and enhance GEGD Pro, the U.S. government’s primary commercial GEOINT platform for secure access, streaming, and analysis of large-scale commercial, radar, electro-optical, and NGA-procured geospatial data.

NRO Makes New Commercial Awards to EarthDaily, Iceye, and Pixxel [link]
NRO has awarded new Strategic Commercial Enhancements contracts to EarthDaily, Iceye, and Pixxel for commercial Earth-sensing data, covering daily global electro-optical and infrared collection, RF data, and hyperspectral imagery as part of its expanding use of commercial satellite capabilities.

Developer's Orbit

The TorchGeo Organization and IBM Research are joining forces! [link]
OSGeo announced that IBM Research’s TerraTorch and TerraKit libraries have joined the TorchGeo Organization, bringing TorchGeo, TerraTorch, and TerraKit together under one GeoAI ecosystem for geospatial deep learning, foundation-model fine-tuning, and AI-ready dataset creation.

Tailoring the View: TiTiler-CMR Customizes HLS Imagery in Worldview and FIRMS [link]
This NASA Earthdata article explains how TiTiler-CMR is bringing dynamic, on-demand HLS visualisation into Worldview and FIRMS, allowing users customise spectral bands, RGB composites, and indices without relying only on pre-generated static imagery.

datanomy: Dissecting data structures [link]
Raul Cumplido’s datanomy is a terminal-based tool for inspecting the anatomy of columnar data files, giving users an interactive view of a Parquet file’s structure, schema, data, metadata, and statistics.

LazyCOGs: Lazy Access to STAC-Indexed COG Archives [link]
Development Seed’s LazyCOGs lazily opens thousands of STAC-indexed Cloud Optimized GeoTIFFs as a spatially aligned xarray DataArray, using a Rust-native stack instead of GDAL/rasterio to query only the assets needed for a given chunk, CRS, and resolution.

Rethinking Change Detection and Attribution: How You Compare Satellite Embeddings Matters [link]
In this post Mina Burns explores how different ways of comparing AlphaEarth satellite embeddings can produce similar accuracy scores but very different change-attribution maps, arguing that baseline context, training-data balance, and spatial validation matter as much as classifier choice when using geospatial foundation-model outputs.

Introducing OlmoEarth embeddings: Custom embedding exports from OlmoEarth Studio for downstream analysis [link]
Ai2’s OlmoEarth Studio now lets users compute and export custom Earth-observation embedding COGs for chosen areas, time ranges, resolutions, encoder variants, and Sentinel-1 or Sentinel-2 inputs, supporting downstream tasks such as similarity search, few-shot segmentation, change detection, and unsupervised exploration.

Introducing BetaEarth - your own Earth embedding emulator [link]
Mikolaj Czerkawski introduces BetaEarth as a lightweight, open emulator of the AlphaEarth annual embedding product, using the project to explore how far EO embeddings can be reconstructed from other observations while prompting a broader discussion on whether Earth foundation models are beginning to converge toward shared representations of the planet.

Data

Copernicus Adds ERA5-Derived Thermal Comfort Indices to CDS [link]
Copernicus Climate Change Service has added ERA5-derived thermal comfort index time series to the Climate Data Store, giving users hourly UTCI and mean radiant temperature data from 1940 to near real time for point locations or small areas without downloading full global grids.

Thermal comfort indices time-series derived from ERA5 reanalysis [link]

April Releases: Copernicus Marine Launches Three New Products [link]
"Copernicus Marine continues to expand its portfolio of operational ocean intelligence with the release of three new and updated products. Together, they provide new insights into Arctic change, large-scale ocean circulation, and the consistency of global sea surface temperature observations, supporting a wide range of scientific, operational, and policy applications. "

EOForestSTAC: STAC Browser instance of the EO Forest STAC Catalog [link]
Simon Besnard has released EOForestSTAC, an open-source toolbox and STAC catalogue designed to make large-scale forest Earth Observation datasets easier to discover and use across themes such as biomass, forest disturbance, canopy height, forest age, and land-use change.

• Explore the catalogue: https://simonbesnard1.github.io/eoforeststac

• GitHub: https://github.com/simonbesnard1/eoforeststac

• Docs: https://eoforeststac.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Digital Earth Africa launches continental Water Quality Monitoring Service to strengthen evidence-based water management [link]
Digital Earth Africa has launched a continental Water Quality Monitoring Service that turns harmonised satellite observations into decision-ready information on African lakes, dams, and reservoirs, including indicators such as surface temperature, turbidity, floating algae, trophic state, and optical water type.

Snapshots

Earth from Space: Netherlands in bloom [link]
ESA’s Earth from Space image, captured by Copernicus Sentinel-2 on 21 April 2026, shows a “double bloom” in the Netherlands, with colourful tulip fields on land and blue-green phytoplankton swirls across the North Sea.

Stunning images from Biomass mark its one year in orbit [link]
ESA marks one year of its Biomass satellite in orbit with a gallery of polarimetric P-band radar images showing forests, rivers, tundra, ice, and other landscapes in structural detail rather than natural colour. The mission is already demonstrating how its canopy-penetrating radar can support better estimates of forest carbon stocks while also opening up wider applications, from environmental-change monitoring to ice-sheet dynamics and possible subsurface geology in arid regions.

Interesting read

Publishing Planetary-Scale Data is Easy [link]
The release of Fields of the World, covering 3.17 billion field boundaries across 241 countries and territorie,s shows that publishing planetary-scale data through cloud object storage is now relatively easy. The harder work lies in creating, sustaining, improving, and opening high-quality data products for broad contribution.

• Global Fields of The World (FTW) on Source Cooperative [link]

• Web browser [link]

Four ways Google Research scientists have been using Empirical Research Assistance [link]
Google Research highlights how its Empirical Research Assistance (ERA) system can support scientific discovery, including an EO example where weather-satellite data from GOES-East is combined with meteorological information and OCO-2/OCO-3 measurements to estimate atmospheric CO₂ every 10 minutes. The work suggests that AI can extract new climate-monitoring value from existing observational instruments, especially where dedicated greenhouse-gas satellites offer high precision but limited spatial and temporal coverage. The same work also shows relevance beyond climate, with AI-generated approaches performing strongly on high-resolution satellite-image segmentation tasks.

Related:

• Accelerating scientific discovery with AI-powered Empirical Research Assistance [link]

African Journalists Spent Earth Day Mapping Mines. Here’s Why That’s Important to Pulitzer Center [link]
Pulitzer Center describes how African journalists joined geospatial experts on Earth Day to help build Africa Mining Watch, an open-source tool using satellite imagery, AI, and locally verified labels to detect and track mining activity across the continent.

After 1,200 years, cherry blossom record to live on despite Japanese scientist’s death [link]
This is not directly related to the usual topics covered in this newsletter, but it fits loosely with the broader themes of climate records, long-term datasets, and data product continuity.

The Guardian reports on the death of Prof Yasuyuki Aono, who maintained a 1,200-year Kyoto mountain cherry blossom record used as a marker of climate change, and on the call to find a new researcher who can continue observing the same species in the same location. Even historically important environmental datasets can depend on individual maintainers; their continuity is as much an institutional problem as a technical one.

Competitions

Dataviz Challenge: From Ocean Data to Visual Storytelling [link]
Copernicus Marine has opened its DataViz Challenge, inviting designers, cartographers, and data-visualisation specialists to create original visual stories from Copernicus Marine ocean data, with selected work to be featured on the cover of the Ocean State Report 10th Anniversary Edition.
The challenge will run until 19 June.

ICEYE announces 2025 financials [link]
ICEYE exceeded €250 million in 2025 revenue, beating its own projections by 25%, as rising demand for SAR imagery linked to geopolitical tensions helped drive growth and support a planned expansion in satellite production capacity.

Planet Develops Novel Radio Communication Systems That Support Hybrid Space-to-Ground and Space-to-Space Connectivity [link]
Planet is developing new radio communication systems that combine space-to-ground and space-to-space links, effectively building a network that can route data across satellites and back to ground stations to reduce latency bottlenecks. The immediate implication is faster data delivery and better support for lower-latency applications, with Planet using its Pelican satellites to test and integrate capabilities such as Real Time Communications and high-speed downlink hardware into its fleet.

BlackSky Awarded Multi-Year Sole-Source $99 Million US Government IDIQ Contract for Advanced, Next Generation Capabilities [link]
BlackSky has won a multi-year, sole-source $99 million U.S. government IDIQ contract, with an initial $2 million award to speed the design of an advanced large-aperture optical payload for next-generation Earth Observation and space domain awareness platforms.

Airmo Earns 5 Million Euro in Seed Funding, Plans First Launch for 2027 [link]
Airmo has raised €5 million in seed funding to scale its methane-monitoring business and prepare for a first satellite launch in the second quarter of 2027, built around a compact sensor that combines short-wave infrared imaging and LiDAR to detect leaks from low Earth orbit.

Satellogic Plans Next-Gen Merlin EO Constellation [link]
Satellogic’s next-generation Merlin constellation is designed to deliver daily global mapping at one-metre resolution, with the first satellite planned for October 2026.

Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem Passes 600,000 Registered Users [link]
The Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem has surpassed 600,000 registered users worldwide, a milestone the post presents as reflecting growing global use of Earth Observation data and the role of scalable cloud services in supporting access, retrieval, processing, and practical applications.

Wyvern Partners With NSG UP42 to Expand Hyperspectral Tasking in Saudi Arabia [link]
Wyvern announced a partnership with Neo Space Group UP42 to make its Dragonette hyperspectral data available for tasking in Saudi Arabia, for applications in agriculture, environmental monitoring, resource management, and infrastructure development through standardized, analysis-ready data.

Groundsource: using AI to help communities better predict natural disasters [link]
Groundsource uses Gemini to turn unstructured global news reports into a historical flash-flood dataset that supports urban flood forecasting with up to 24 hours of lead time.

Related:

• Introducing Groundsource: Turning news reports into data with Gemini [link]

• Protecting cities with AI-driven flash flood forecasting [link]

Another Earth Raises $4M to Expand AI Platform for Synthetic Satellite Data [link]
Vienna-based startup Another Earth has raised $4 million in seed funding to expand its platform for generating synthetic satellite imagery and environmental scenario simulations, aimed at producing labelled geospatial training data for AI models used in environmental and operational risk detection.

Developer's Orbit

Similarity Search with Embeddings [link]
An xarray and Dask workflow uses open AlphaEarth Foundations embeddings to find grain silos in Franklin County, Kansas through cosine similarity search.

Characterizing Census Blocks with Satellite Embedding Statistics [link]
Alpha Earth Foundation embeddings can be aggregated to census blocks and used as tabular features, with a simple logistic regression separating urban and rural blocks at 92.5% accuracy.

Segmenting Cattle Operations with AlphaEarth Embeddings in Barton County, Kansas [link]
Earth Genome has published a case study from Barton County, Kansas showing how AlphaEarth embeddings, spatial priors, and a lightweight Random Forest workflow can be combined to segment cattle feedlots into lots, ponds, and background at pixel level, with the aim of better estimating facility footprints and environmental impacts.

STAC: A common language for finding geospatial data | Scene from Above S15E5 [link]
An overview of STAC as a standard for discovering and accessing geospatial data, with emphasis on its growing industry adoption.

Pangeo Showcase: “Visualizing Zarr with zarr-layer” [link]
zarr-layer renders Zarr data directly as a native custom layer in MapLibre or Mapbox, selecting intersecting chunks at the current resolution and handling reprojection on the GPU.

AlphaEarth Foundations Satellite Embeddings: A Look at Our Planet in 2025 [link]
Google’s 2025 update to the AlphaEarth Foundations Satellite Embedding dataset introduces a global annual layer that compresses a year of multi-source satellite data into 64-dimensional, 10-metre embeddings, aimed at making year-over-year surface change analysis faster and easier.

RaQuet: Raster Data in Apache Parquet [link]
RaQuet is an open specification and CLI for storing raster data in standard Apache Parquet files so it can be queried with SQL across modern analytics engines, effectively acting as a raster counterpart to GeoParquet for the data warehouse and lakehouse world.

Streaming millions of TESSERA tiles over HTTP with Zarr v3 [link]
Anil Madhavapeddy describes a Zarr v3 layout for streaming TESSERA geospatial embeddings over HTTP, reorganising millions of per-tile NumPy files into sharded annual stores designed to support both lightweight pixel-level access and larger regional analysis with only a small number of range requests.

Data

Overture Maps Foundation now offers a STAC catalogue with all their datasets [link]
Overture Maps Foundation now offers a STAC catalogue for all of its datasets, making them easier to browse and access through a familiar geospatial data standard.

OceanBench — Evaluating AI Ocean Models [link]
OceanBench is an open benchmark from Mercator Ocean for evaluating ocean forecasting systems against reference ocean analysis datasets, reanalyses, and observations, with a public interface for comparing scores and an open-source GitHub project for broader use and contribution.

New Dataset Search Tool in Climate Engine [link]
Climate Engine has introduced a new dataset search tool to help users navigate its 100+ datasets by filtering for variables, time period, frequency, geographic coverage, catalog source, and spatial resolution, while also linking to documentation and public JSON metadata for developers.

Search tool at https://app.climateengine.org/dataset_search
Related:

• Data Stories: 10 Maps to Spark Exploration with Climate Engine [link]

New NECCTON Ocean Viewer opens access to next-generation marine ecosystem data [link]
Copernicus Marine has launched the NECCTON Ocean Viewer as a new tool for exploring next-generation marine ecosystem data, opening access to information on marine ecosystem dynamics through an interactive viewer.

HeiGIT Expands Risk Assessment Datasets to 119 Countries [link]
HeiGIT’s risk assessment datasets are now available for 119 countries through the Humanitarian Data Exchange, expanding open access to hazard exposure data designed to support anticipatory action, disaster preparedness, GIS-based risk assessments, comparative analysis, and operational decision-making.

Explore the datasets [link]

New Soil Water Index datasets bring deeper insight into global soil moisture [link]
Copernicus Land Monitoring Service has released the updated Soil Water Index 0.1° Version 4 products, providing daily and ten-daily global soil moisture estimates from 2007 to the present by combining satellite observations with modelling to track moisture conditions across different soil depths.

Snapshots

Cañon Fiord’s Whirling Waters [link]
Landsat 8 captured swirling eddies in Cañon Fiord during the 2022 Arctic summer melt season, with fractured sea ice and turquoise sediment plumes tracing currents shaped by meltwater, glacial flour, and seasonal ice breakup.

Interesting read

EarthCARE tracks how ship emissions transform clouds [link]
Ships are the biggest source of human-made sulphur dioxide emissions over the oceans, and the clouds left in their wake, known as ship tracks, can differ markedly from nearby clouds. This EarthCARE image uses observations from the Multispectral Imager to show how these emissions can alter cloud properties from space.

NASA’s PACE Satellite Provides New Pollution Measuring Product [link]
NASA’s PACE satellite now offers a new nitrogen dioxide product that extends the mission’s capabilities beyond ocean and aerosol measurements to track a harmful air pollutant linked to fossil fuel and wood burning. By combining OCI observations with training from Sentinel-5P’s TROPOMI instrument, the new product enables finer-scale pollution monitoring, helping researchers identify sources as small as individual factories or highway corridors.

Global Views of ICESat-2 Data [link]
NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio has released a rotating-globe visualisation of ICESat-2 data products, showing how the mission’s laser altimeter measures land and ice elevation, sea ice, ocean surface height, forests, clouds, and aerosols to track changes in Earth’s surface and atmosphere.

EarthCARE maps vast atmospheric dust trails [link]
EarthCARE is mapping large atmospheric dust plumes, using its observations to show the global distribution and movement of mineral dust in the atmosphere and to improve understanding of how these aerosols affect radiation, clouds, and climate.

Spotlight on an instrument: Copernicus Sentinel-5 [link]
Copernicus Sentinel-5, the Ultraviolet Visible Near-infrared Short-wave infrared (UVNS) spectrometer aboard Metop Second Generation A, will deliver near-global daily observations of ozone, nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide, methane, carbon monoxide, aerosols, and wildfire smoke to support air quality monitoring, ozone-hole tracking, and climate applications.

If AI Is Going to Task Satellites, We Need Standards [link]
Element84 makes the case that enabling AI systems to task satellites at scale will require a practical, widely adopted tasking standard rather than one designed to describe every possible sensor state.

Takeaways from the First Geospatial Vector Embeddings Standards Sprint [link]
Jason Gilman’s takeaways from the first geospatial vector embeddings standards sprint point to growing agreement around Zarr, a draft STAC extension, and the need for clearer terminology and stronger model documentation.

LinkedIn Highlights

GeoPackage Still Has a Place Alongside Parquet [link]
Mark Litwintschik writes that GeoPackage still has a place alongside Parquet when bundled styling or editable data matter, with DuckDB v1.5.0 also improving GeoPackage generation speed and adding support for structs.

Against the “Built It Alone” AI Narrative [link]
Jonas Sølvsteen calls for less emphasis on “look what I built alone with Claude over the weekend” narratives and more attention to how AI can be used productively in collaborative creative environments, pointing to GDAL’s open-source contribution policy as an example.

Learning

An assortment of GTC sessions for weather & climate enthusiasts [link]
Sanjay Choudhry selects a set of NVIDIA GTC sessions for weather and climate audiences, covering AI-powered climate risk ensembles, climate system digital twins, kilometre-scale Earth system modelling, Earth-2 for resilience, and geospatial workflow acceleration.

Monitoring Climate Change from Space Webinar Series #1 | Satellite Retrievals of CO2 and Methane [link]
This ESA webinar offers an overview of space-based observations of CO2 and methane, explaining how satellite measurements are turned into atmospheric concentration estimates and used to assess human-made emissions and natural sinks, while also highlighting the ESA GHG-CCI project and its links to wider climate services and related initiatives.

Earth Observation is far easier to access than it was a decade ago. Data once handled by a narrow set of agencies and specialist teams now circulate through open archives, cloud platforms, browser tools, and shared analytical environments. Those changes have widened entry, lowered some technical barriers, and made new forms of scrutiny possible. Yet public use still fails for more ordinary administrative reasons. Monitoring programmes lose continuity, workflows never become a stable part of institutional operations, and technically available services sit idle when budgets tighten, procurement stalls, staff move on, or no organisation takes responsibility after release. Availability is only one condition of public use. On its own, it secures very little.

Part of the confusion lies in treating openness as a single condition. A sensing asset produces data. An access regime determines who can use them and on what terms. An operational layer turns them into alerts, maps, and monitoring outputs. Organisational uptake relies on ministries, agencies, NGOs, journalists, or community groups having authority, staff, methods, and routines for repeated use. Some arrangements add a further public-facing layer that keeps information available and inspectable across institutions and publics. Each part breaks down differently, and each draws on its own mix of budgets, contracts, stewardship, and administrative effort. An arrangement can look open on paper and remain thin in practice.

Markets can sustain some parts of this landscape. Firms will pay for bespoke analytics, tasking priority, premium delivery, or sector-specific products when the gains are direct and excludable. Public-facing uses are harder to fund that way. Regulatory oversight, early warning, environmental monitoring, and accountability produce benefits that spill across agencies and sectors, often appearing as avoided harm, better timing, or stronger scrutiny rather than revenue to a single buyer. Those gains are real, but they are difficult to capture through individual transactions. Public procurement and anchor demand therefore shape markets in ways private demand rarely will on its own.

That distinction helps separate cases often grouped together under the heading of openness. Carbon Mapper, MethaneSAT, and FireSat involve monitoring capabilities whose social return is easier to defend than to monetise. NICFI centres on purchased access to imagery already in orbit. SERVIR and Digital Earth Africa show what uptake requires inside institutions and regions. Global Forest Watch serves a different function, keeping shared evidence available across journalists, public agencies, NGOs, and researchers who would otherwise work from more fragmented ground. The economics of openness change at each point.

Methane monitoring is a useful test case because it sits close to regulation and disclosure. Carbon Mapper and MethaneSAT were designed to produce open evidence at a scale relevant to verification, reporting, and enforcement. Both lie somewhere between a classic public mission and a customer-led analytics business. Their intended users extended well beyond paying clients, since the point was to support scrutiny by regulators, watchdogs, researchers, and the wider public.

Carbon Mapper brings together scientific leadership, non-profit coordination, philanthropic capital, public collaboration, and commercial aerospace delivery. Led by the non-profit Carbon Mapper and developed with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Planet Labs, CARB, and other scientific and philanthropic partners, it produces data intended to work at facility scales, where methane evidence can support oversight and regulatory action. That leaves it in an awkward funding position. The outputs are more operational than those of a research mission, while the customer base is less clearly bounded than in a conventional commercial analytics offer. Philanthropy absorbed early risk and helped establish the mission. Public and private partners helped move it towards operation. Procurement has started to carry more of the load, with California supporting the capability through its Satellite Data Purchase Program. The case shows how many sources of support may have to be assembled before this kind of monitoring becomes durable.

MethaneSAT followed a different institutional route. Led by the Environmental Defense Fund with scientific and aerospace partners, and backed by major philanthropic funding, it aimed to strengthen independent methane accountability in oil and gas. Open access was central to that purpose. Oversight depended on use beyond self-reporting and beyond a closed circle of paying users.

When the satellite lost contact in 2025, less than two years after launch, the loss exposed fragility beyond the technical failure itself. A mission built for climate accountability and free public use still left continuity, replacement, and long-term stewardship unresolved once the initial coalition had brought it into operation.

Taken together, Carbon Mapper and MethaneSAT occupy a difficult funding position within methane monitoring. Their outputs are more directly usable for accountability, follow-up investigation, and regulatory screening than broad-coverage public systems, while their economics sit uneasily between public infrastructure and customer-led services. Philanthropic finance recurs here because it can move faster than formal procurement, absorb early uncertainty, and help bring a capability into being before governments decide whether to carry it forward. That helps at the establishment stage. It does not settle who funds persistence, who carries replacement risk, or which public institution is prepared to treat the capability as part of its own responsibilities.

Wildfire detection presents a similar funding problem through a different public function. Earlier detection can change dispatch, evacuation, and containment in the first hours of a fire, when small ignitions may still be controlled and delay is costly. The social return can therefore be large even where no broad paying market forms beneath it. FireSat is being assembled through a hybrid arrangement led by Earth Fire Alliance, with Google Research and Google.org involved in development and funding, and Muon Space responsible for building and operating the FireSat Protoflight mission. That mix reduces the immediate burden on ordinary procurement while drawing on private-sector capacity that already exists.

A public wildfire baseline can coexist with commercial offers built around bespoke coverage, premium analytics, and customer-specific products. Even so, that baseline requires clear protection. Building and operating a programme like FireSat gives private firms flight heritage, operational experience, and credibility that can travel into later contracts. Defence demand, premium services, and other customer priorities may become more attractive as the programme matures. Technical success could create pressure to prioritise some users or services over others unless commitments to public use are protected in the programme design.

Methane and wildfire arrive at the same funding difficulty from different directions. Their public returns are broad, visible, and politically intelligible, while paying demand remains fragmented. Hybrid finance can establish the capability. Its persistence turns on who accepts continuing budget responsibility and how the public obligation is protected once commercial incentives deepen.

Norway’s NICFI programme operates at another point in the chain. It did not finance a new sensor. It used public money to buy access rights to existing commercial imagery and make that imagery available to a wide non-commercial user base. Under a 2020 agreement involving Planet Labs, Airbus, and KSAT, Norway opened monthly high-resolution mosaics across more than forty tropical countries without requiring each government, NGO, Indigenous organisation, or research group to procure imagery separately. Public finance was paying for openness itself.

Norway could move quickly. The imagery was already in orbit. Users gained access that would otherwise have remained expensive, fragmented, or both, and commercial supply entered forest governance on altered terms through a contract that built openness into the arrangement.

Continued access then rested on the durability of that contract, the legal design behind it, and the state’s willingness to keep paying after the public rationale had already been established. The first phase concluded in January 2025, and the follow-on procurement was later cancelled in September 2025 after a legal challenge, making clear the fragility of purchased openness.

Forest governance, Indigenous rights, land use, and transparency in deforestation-linked supply chains already involved disputes over evidence and authority. The imagery did not create those disputes. It changed who could enter them and with what evidential footing. Journalists, NGOs, Indigenous organisations, and public agencies could investigate and contest claims more effectively, though that wider non-commercial use still depended on a procurement mechanism carrying most of the access burden.

Access removes one barrier and leaves another untouched. Ministries and agencies still need documented methods, trained staff, infrastructure, and enough control over the work to adapt it to local decisions and keep it alive after the first funding cycle ends.

SERVIR was built around that harder part of the problem. Through regional hubs across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, it linked NASA data with local technical partners and operational priorities around floods, drought, deforestation, food security, air quality, and related concerns. Its approach built capacity through methods, workflows, and operational processes embedded inside institutions expected to use them repeatedly.

EO becomes dependable inside a ministry, technical agency, or regional risk-management body when it supports recurring decisions and can be carried out by staff as part of ordinary practice. SERVIR has documented cases such as crop-insurance support in Kenya and a forest-fire detection and monitoring system in Nepal, which show how EO workflows can become embedded in public decision processes. They are most useful as examples of repeated institutional use. A dataset can remain available for years without changing administrative practice. A workflow gains firmer footing when it becomes part of a seasonal process, a response protocol, or a standing decision routine. Shared repositories, documented methods, and networked training systems can make these practices more portable across hubs and less reliant on any single team.

Budget hierarchies often treat training, method maintenance, and staff continuity as secondary to hardware, platforms, or visible interfaces. Yet regular use usually rests on those less visible forms of support. SERVIR’s more durable achievements came from embedding methods and decision support within organisations so that the work could continue beyond the first grant cycle.

The withdrawal of U.S. government support in 2025 put that institutional base under strain. Parts of the network continued through regional hubs, university partners, technical teams, and practices already built into local work. Trained staff, shared methods, and routine use gave the programme some capacity to continue. Programmes held together mainly by donor finance become vulnerable when that finance is withdrawn. Those rooted in working relationships and locally held methods have a better chance of surviving the same shock.

Digital Earth Africa moves further towards regional public infrastructure. Open archives, analysis-ready data, cloud processing, notebook environments, interfaces, and metadata are assembled within an operational model intended for regular continental use. Built in part on the Open Data Cube, the programme treats openness as infrastructure and places governance and long-term stewardship increasingly within African institutions.

The difference between a technically hosted service and a regionally stewarded one is institutional as well as technical. A hosted service may reduce friction and still leave operational authority elsewhere. A regionally stewarded arrangement distributes management, technical knowledge, and continuing responsibility across institutions on the continent. The location of those capacities affects who can adapt the infrastructure, who can maintain it, and whose priorities shape its development over time. Its longer-term durability rests on use being embedded in national and regional institutions.

Global Forest Watch serves a different function, making forest data, alerts, and analysis available across public agencies, journalists, NGOs, researchers, communities, and companies working under different mandates and with unequal resources. It brought together open forest-monitoring data, cloud-based analysis, forest-change science, and accessible tools in a form that moved information about forest loss beyond specialist repositories and slow reporting cycles. That reach relied on computation, as well as data, being available beyond specialist institutions.

Wider availability changes how different actors can work with overlapping evidence of forest loss. Journalists can identify stories closer to the event. Public agencies can monitor clearance and fire more regularly. Civil society groups can document violations with greater confidence. Companies face closer scrutiny over supply-chain exposure. These are different forms of action, though they draw more often on shared evidence and common tools.

Global Forest Watch occupies a different place from the earlier cases. It is neither a sensing mission, an access-procurement scheme, nor a regional operational service. It works as a shared evidentiary platform. Keeping such a platform alive requires scientific credibility, technical usability, funding continuity, and support from enough institutions and users that withdrawal by any one actor does not immediately collapse the whole arrangement. That breadth of support has been part of its resilience.

Landsat and Copernicus still represent an older model in which Earth Observation is financed and maintained as public infrastructure through long-term state commitment. Many of the newer cases rest on blended funding arrangements and mixed stewardship: hybrid missions, purchased access, regionally embedded operational work, and platforms that keep evidence in circulation across several institutions.

Commercial firms appear throughout these arrangements as builders, operators, suppliers, and sometimes stewards of crucial parts of the chain. Full public ownership of every layer is unnecessary and often implausible. Governments still have to decide which layer is being funded, what public obligation attaches to it, and who carries continuity when contracts lapse, donors withdraw, or commercial incentives shift. At that point procurement is no longer merely technical instrument. It becomes part of governance.

That governance takes shape in ordinary administrative decisions over access rules, embargoes, user categories, service guarantees, procurement terms, maintenance responsibility, and the treatment of the public baseline during emergencies or commercial expansion. Such decisions determine who bears the cost of interruption, whether services narrow towards favoured users, and whether a capability remains usable once the first funding cycle closes.

Open archives and public platforms have widened access, lowered entry costs, and enabled forms of transparency that once required far more concentrated technical power. Yet release is not the same as provision. Missions, access regimes, operational layers, organisational uptake, and shared evidentiary platforms fail in different ways and require different mixtures of public finance, contracts, stewardship, and institutional support.

Some forms of observation and public use require collective funding even when they do not resemble conventional public works. A state may need to sustain a mission, buy access, underwrite an operational layer, support regional stewards, or create anchor demand where no broad commercial market is likely to emerge. When EO supports environmental oversight, climate governance, disaster preparedness, or fairer access to information, public responsibility has to be built into the arrangement from the start.

Earth Observation now combines abundant technical capacity with a far less settled understanding of how collective-use functions are paid for, governed, and kept in use. New sensors, wider visibility, and easier access will not resolve that administrative burden. The underlying choice is whether societies are willing to sustain functions whose public return is clear even when the revenue case is weak. The economics of openness in Earth Observation do not end when data are released. They begin there. Observation serves a public purpose only when access rights, infrastructure, budgets, operational responsibility, and organisational routines hold together long enough for information to shape repeated decisions, oversight, and scrutiny.

Sources / Further Reading

• Planet Awarded as a Subcontractor for $95M California Satellite Data Purchase Program [link]

• How MethaneSAT will hold polluters accountable [link]

• Methane tracker lost in space [link]

• Inside the launch of FireSat, a system to find wildfires earlier [link]

• NICFI Satellite Data Program – Imagery of the World’s Tropical Forests [link]

• Norway cancels procurement for Tropical Forest Satellite Data Program [link]

• SERVIR – 20 years of Connecting Space to Village [link]

• NASA Data Aid Food Security Assessments in Kenya [link]

• Monitoring the World’s Forests with Global Forest Watch [link]

• Bloomberg Philanthropies Commits $25M to Accelerate Satellite Technologies That Pinpoint Methane Emitters to Turbocharge Fight Against Climate Change [link]

• Planet to Provide Carbon Mapper, Inc. with Hyperspectral Data Until 2030 [link]

• New Zealand to Invest $16 million in MethaneSAT [link]

• Earth Fire Alliance Releases First Wildfire Images from FireSat Protoflight [link]

• Norway’s International Climate and Forest Initiative (NICFI) [link]

• Lessons Learned in the Implementation of a Training Knowledge Management System for the SERVIR Network [link]

• Global Forest Cover Change [link]

• Geoscience Australia appoints the Long-Term Owner of the Digital Earth Africa Program [link]

• Digital Earth Africa 2024 Annual Report [link]

• A Landsat/Copernicus open-data economics source [link]

• The impact of near-real-time deforestation alerts across the tropics [link]

• Landsat’s Economic Value increases to $25.6 Billion in 2023 [link]

Level-2 News

Vantor integrates Google Earth AI imagery models into Tensorglobe to support government and commercial missions [link]
Vantor signed an agreement with Google to integrate Google Earth AI imagery models into its Tensorglobe platform, aiming to bring the models into classified, air-gapped government environments and enable fine-tuning on sovereign and commercial multi-sensor data for tasks like change detection, site monitoring, and damage assessment.

constellr Secures €37 Million Series A Funding to Deliver Defence Grade Thermal Intelligence [link]
constellr announced a €37 million Series A round to expand its operational thermal intelligence capabilities and advance them to defence-grade status for governments, military entities, and security agencies.

Earthmover Selected to Power ARIA’s “Forecasting Tipping Points” Simulation Catalogue [link]
Earthmover announced it was selected by ARIA to power the Simulation Catalogue for the Forecasting Tipping Points programme, supporting 26 modelling and observing teams working toward early warning signals for climate tipping points.

Aspia Space Partners With Stelia to Advance AI Architecture for Global-Scale Land Intelligence [link]
Aspia Space announced a strategic partnership with Stelia to upgrade its AI architecture and speed up the conversion of raw satellite data into scalable, decision-ready land intelligence across sectors like finance, agriculture, supply chain, and the public sector.

Leonardo funding development of Earth observation constellation [link]
Leonardo is investing nearly €500 million to develop a roughly 20-satellite Earth observation constellation combining high-resolution optical and SAR, with launches targeted for 2027–2028. The project is intended both to provide proprietary data for e-GEOS and to demonstrate Leonardo’s end-to-end space-to-ground capability, while serving as a potential model for larger European initiatives.

SatVu Raises £30M in Funding Backed by NATO Innovation Fund to Build Thermal Satellite Constellation [link]
SatVu raised £30M in a round backed by the NATO Innovation Fund (plus the British Business Bank and others) to scale its high-resolution thermal imaging capability from a demo satellite toward a multi-satellite constellation, with HotSat-2 and HotSat-3 slated for launch in 2026.

Telespazio Awarded €20 Million Contract for Canary Islands Constellation [link]
Telespazio Ibérica won a €20M contract to deliver the Canary Islands’ Earth-observation constellation, including the ground segment and operations for three 20-30 kg satellites plus a 2027 technology demonstrator, to support climate impacts monitoring, resource management, and emergency response.

ICEYE Launches New Deforestation Monitoring Tool [link]
ICEYE launched a SAR-based deforestation monitoring tool to provide near-real-time detections of illegal forest clearing.

NRO Awards Contracts to Three Remote Sensing Companies [link]
The U.S. National Reconnaissance Office awarded the first three "Strategic Commercial Enhancements" contracts under its Commercial Solutions Opening to HEO (non-Earth imagery), SatVu (medium-wave infrared thermal imagery), and Sierra Nevada Corporation (radio-frequency sensing), expanding access to multi-phenomenology commercial remote sensing data.

Methane Monitoring Science Act [link]
U.S. Reps. Don Beyer (D-VA) and Pat Harrigan (R-NC) introduced the Methane Monitoring Science Act, directing NASA to assess methane-monitoring technology and improve data sharing across government and industry to help detect and stop leaks from sources including oil and gas operations and agriculture.

BlackSky’s Growth Contracts in 2025 for Second Year [link]
BlackSky reported $106.6M in 2025 revenue (+4.4% YoY) with a 32% backlog increase to $345M driven by $240M in contract bookings, even as net loss widened to $70.3M, with management pointing to near-record Q4 performance tied to Gen-3 satellite deployment and demonstrations.

Related:

• NGA Awards BlackSky Seven-Figure Order on Luno A Contract [link]
  BlackSky secured a seven-figure renewal order from NGA under the Luno A Facility Monitoring Delivery Order, continuing its high-cadence, AI-enabled change detection to track activity and anomalies at military and economic sites worldwide.

• BlackSky International Customer Orders Gen-3 Satellite for Sovereign Access [link]
  BlackSky signed a deal with an unnamed international customer for a dedicated Gen-3 satellite plus BlackSky’s imagery and AI-enabled analytics, offering a sovereign space-based intelligence capability (including 35 cm imaging) for dynamic monitoring of the customer’s national and regional areas of interest.

Axelspace and Synspective Lock In Imagery Contracts for Japanese Constellation [link]
Axelspace and Synspective finalised contracts (via the Tri-Sat Constellation consortium led by SKY Perfect JSAT, Mitsubishi Electric and Mitsui) to supply optical and SAR imagery to Japan’s Ministry of Defense for its planned privately operated constellation, with services running through March 2031.

Planet and AXA Partner for AI-Powered Risk Management Platform [link]
Planet Labs’ German subsidiary is partnering with AXA’s new Digital Commercial Platform (AXA DCP) to feed Planet’s high- and medium-resolution imagery and near-daily basemaps into an AI-powered risk management system to monitor and anticipate disasters like floods, wildfires, and hurricanes.

Sidus Space Forms New EO Partnership with Simera Sense [link]
Sidus Space partnered with Simera Sense to develop next-generation hyperspectral imaging with in-orbit processing and analytics by combining Simera’s sensors with Sidus’ FeatherEdge hardware and Cielo AI software, aiming to cut ground-processing dependency and deliver faster, more actionable EO insights for government and commercial missions.

Developer's Orbit

GeoTessera - Python library for the Tessera embeddings [link]
"GeoTessera provides access to geospatial embeddings from the Tessera foundation model, which processes Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 satellite imagery to generate 128-channel representation maps at 10m resolution. These embeddings compress a full year of temporal-spectral features into dense representations optimised for downstream geospatial analysis tasks. Read more details about the model."

Open source Innovation Clusters code [link]
DSIT’s Data Science team has open sourced the Innovation Clusters map front end, an award recognised tool showcasing 3,000 innovation clusters across 85 sectors, so others can learn from and build their own accessible, data driven mapping tools.

• GitHub Repo [link]

• Live tool [link]

stac-map [link]
A map-first STAC search and visualization tool, with stac-geoparquet support.

TorchGeo 0.9.0 [link]
TorchGeo v0.9.0 adds 13 new datasets, introduces precomputed "Earth embeddings" datasets, and improves time-series and change-detection support, with some breaking changes on the road to 1.0.

HyperCoast QGIS plugin [link]
Qiusheng Wu shared a tutorial introducing the HyperCoast QGIS plugin, which helps users open, inspect, and visualize hyperspectral datasets in QGIS from missions like AVIRIS, NEON, PACE, EMIT, DESIS, PRISMA, and EnMAP, with support for related datasets such as ECOSTRESS.

Screencast video credit: Qiusheng Wu

Data

Over 100,000 New Data Files Available from NISAR [link]
"The NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) mission team has released new Level-1 to Level-3 L-band data products via the Alaska Satellite Facility DAAC.

This is the second publication of NISAR data since the satellite’s launch in July 2025. The new data collections capture a sampling of locations around the world that will help users develop workflows in accessing files, get more familiar with the data files themselves, and have the ability to create a time-series with the data."

NISAR Data User Guide [link]

CarbonPlan launches Open Climate Risk for building-level U.S. wildfire risk [link]
CarbonPlan launched Open Climate Risk, a fully open and free-to-access option for building-level climate risk data in the United States (starting with wildfire), built to address the high cost and limited transparency of proprietary risk models.

Open Climate Risk Explorer [link]

NASA PACE cloud height data quality page gets a major update [link]
Andrew Sayer shared a major update to a public page that checks the quality of NASA PACE cloud-height measurements by comparing them with ground-based observations from monitoring sites. The update adds results from about the first 1.5 years of the mission and gives users an early, practical view of data quality (including downloadable site-level comparisons) ahead of a future journal paper.

NASA PACE Cloud Top Height [link]

Earth Blox dataset review: MODIS Net Primary Productivity (NPP) [link]
EarthBlox highlights MODIS NPP (gap-filled MOD17A3HGF v6.1) as the most consistent long-term global record of terrestrial carbon fixation since 2001, and positions it as a practical backbone for nature-related disclosure and compliance, including TNFD (Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures) and the EU’s CSRD (Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive), for baseline-setting and chronic nature-risk assessment.

Pioneering Satellite Data Enhances Ocean and Sea-Level Monitoring [link]
Copernicus Marine introduced a new global altimetry dataset that significantly improves how scientists observe the ocean by merging traditional nadir altimetry with SWOT KaRIn measurements to deliver higher-resolution sea-surface-height fields, improving monitoring of ocean circulation, mesoscale variability, and coastal sea-level change.

Snapshots

Earth from Space: Terra Nova Bay, Antarctica [link]
A Copernicus Sentinel-2 image of Terra Nova Bay in East Antarctica (14 February) captures late-summer minimum sea-ice conditions, with drifting white floes and icebergs tracing swirling ocean currents between Cape Washington and the Drygalski Ice Tongue.

Interesting read

NASA Lifelines - 2025 Year In Review [link]
NASA Lifelines has published the full 2025 Year in Review, showing how they are turning Earth observation into real world humanitarian impact through programmes like Ready for Impact, Speed Dating, fellowships, and Supper Clubs. Highlights include engaging over 1,000 experts, supporting teams working with satellite imagery and GeoAI across multiple regions, and scaling partnerships that bring funding and technical support into the community.

When Kepler Meets Turing [link]
In his essay, Muon Space CEO Jonny Dyer argues that orbital data centers are "inevitable", but the real story is a broader space technology revolution: as launch gets cheaper and AI drives a surge in demand for compute and power, space systems and Earth-based infrastructure are likely to merge into a single, tightly connected global stack, creating major opportunities and new risks over the next 20 years.

Reducing Government Costs and Increasing Access to Greenspaces in the United Kingdom with DINO [link]
Forest Research in the UK is applying the open-source DINOv2 model — trained on 18 million satellite images to generate a high-resolution canopy-height map capable of detecting individual trees globally — to improve the detection of small woodlands and urban canopy, reduce reliance on costly LiDAR surveys, and strengthen the evidence base for government greenspace and environmental monitoring decisions.

Cows going global – reflections on a year mapping manure around the world [link]
Earth Genome’s post reflects on a year of mapping cattle facilities and manure-related signatures around the world for Climate TRACE, using Earth Index and foundation-model embeddings on satellite imagery to help improve greenhouse-gas emissions tracking. It also shares technical scaling lessons (global transferability limits, larger regional models) and highlights ongoing work on a proposed Bovine Slurry Index (BSI) to improve remote sensing detection of cattle pens and liquid manure waste.

Build your own probability of fire model [link]
ECMWF introduced the Probability of Fire (PoF)-Toolbox, a lightweight set of reproducible Jupyter notebooks (plus a starter dataset) that lets users build, train, and deploy local machine-learning fire-danger models using their own data.

Using satellite images to support erosion control in Madagascar [link]
Through ESA’s Global Development Assistance (GDA) Fast Earth Observation Co-Financing Facility, the German Development Bank KfW supported Madagascar’s anti-erosion and reforestation programme by adding satellite monitoring for fires, reforestation progress, and forest biomass, giving funders and national institutions clearer, evidence-based tracking at scale.

Using Φ-lab’s machine learning algorithms to fight mosquito-borne outbreaks in Brazil and Peru [link]
ESA Φ-lab highlights DIRE (Disease Incidence and Resource Estimator), a predictive mapping and decision-support platform that uses a climate-based ensemble machine-learning approach developed by Φ-lab for UNICEF to forecast dengue and malaria risk in Brazil and Peru, and estimate the resources and costs needed for response.

Drifting away from MODIS in the CAMS Global Fire Assimilation System [link]
The Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) is going through a major transition in its global fire monitoring as NASA’s long-running MODIS instruments on Terra and Aqua approach retirement, expanding GFAS to incorporate VIIRS and Copernicus Sentinel-3 inputs to maintain a continuous global fire-emissions record.

LinkedIn Highlights

Earth observation VS geospatial VS remote sensing [link]
Classic debate: Aravind is separating EO, remote sensing, and geospatial into practice, science, and discipline, and the comments section is on fire.

Climate

Visualising Climate 2026 [link]
"The first global conference dedicated to how data visualisation can transform public understanding of our changing planet and support informed decision-making in the face of climate challenges."

Global Climate Highlights 2025 [link]
The Copernicus Climate Change Service’s Global Climate Highlights 2025 report provides a brief synopsis of the state of global climate in 2025, based mainly on ECMWF’s ERA5 reanalysis, covering air temperature, sea-surface temperature and polar sea ice, and putting results in the context of the Paris Agreement targets.

Key highlights:

• 2025 was the third-warmest year on record (ERA5): global average 14.97°C, +0.59°C vs 1991–2020, about +1.47°C vs 1850-1900.

• Near-1.5°C context: 2025 itself did not reach 1.5°C above pre-industrial, but the 2023–2025 three-year average did (first time in the instrumental record, per ERA5).

• Persistent high ocean warmth: extra-polar sea-surface temperature ranked third-highest in 2025, remaining historically high despite mostly neutral to weak La Niña conditions.

• Sea ice lows: February 2025 saw the lowest global sea-ice extent for any month in the satellite era, driven by very low Arctic ice and below-average Antarctic ice.

• Extremes continued: 2025 featured major impacts from floods, heatwaves, drought and wildfires, and half the globe saw more days than average with at least strong heat stress.

Full report [link]
Interactive graphics gallery [link]

Upcoming Events

PACE Applications Workshop: Putting PACE Data to Work Across the Earth System [link]
NASA’s PACE Applications Team is hosting a free, virtual PACE Applications Workshop on 11-12 March 2026 to help current and prospective users put PACE data to work across aquatic (e.g., harmful algal blooms, fisheries, public health), atmospheric (air quality, modeling), and terrestrial (agriculture, forestry) applications, with talks plus capacity-building demos and tutorials.

Live Browsing Sentinel Zarr – EOPF Explorer Launch Webinar [link]
"Join ESA, Development Seed, EOX, and thriveGEO for the official launch of the EOPF Sentinel Zarr Explorer – a new platform bringing cloud-native visualisation to Sentinel data."

Mon 9 Mar 2026 15:00 - 16:00 CET
Online, Zoom

Artificial intelligence and earth observation: From innovation to services [link]
The European Commission (DG DEFIS, with HaDEA support) is hosting a hybrid workshop in Brussels on 9-10 March 2026 on how AI and other new digital technologies can turn Copernicus Earth observation data into reliable services, and how Copernicus can link with DestinE. The event includes keynotes, technical briefings, panels and hands-on demos, with online streaming available (on-site registration is closed).

LST_cci Workshop 12-14 May 2026 [link]
The ESA Climate Change Initiative Land Surface Temperature (LST_cci) project is running a user workshop on 1-–14 May 2026 at the Met Office in Exeter, focused on satellite land surface temperature products, user requirements and applications, with an ESMValTool training session on the final day.

2026 Data Fusion Contest [link]
The 2026 IEEE GRSS Data Fusion Contest invites participants to tackle "SAR Temporal Storytelling" by developing methods on open, densely sampled InSAR-compatible stacks of very-high-resolution X-band SAR imagery from a commercial constellation, with winners showcased at IGARSS 2026.

Learning

"Watch the replay of this Copernicus Marine webinar showcasing how Python can be used to analyse marine data, with a focus on sea surface temperature trends under climate change in the Black Sea. The session presents practical examples using Copernicus Marine products for data access, analysis, and visualisation."

NASA Selects Two Earth System Explorers Missions [link]
NASA has selected two Earth System Explorers missions, STRIVE and EDGE, for continued development, with confirmation reviews planned for 2027 and launches no earlier than 2030. STRIVE is designed to deliver daily, near-global vertically resolved measurements of atmospheric temperature, aerosols, ozone, and trace gases, while EDGE will map 3D ecosystem structure and the surface topography of glaciers and sea ice, extending capabilities beyond ICESat-2 and GEDI.

German AI company LiveEO launches its own satellite constellation to monitor critical infrastructure [link]
LiveEO announced Twinspector, a new high-resolution 3D Earth observation satellite constellation built with German partners to support large-scale monitoring of critical infrastructure.

ESA’s Earth Observation programme now has its own linkedin page [link]

Earthmover announced a Data Marketplace [link]
Earthmover launched a cloud-native Data Marketplace for weather, climate, and EO datasets, offering instant access to analysis-ready data (no downloads or ingestion) in Icechunk format from providers like ECMWF/NOAA and several AI-forecast partners.

UK Space Agency Seeks Satellite Direct-to-Device Solutions for Delayed Emergency Services Network [link]
The UK Space Agency has asked industry for proposals to add satellite direct-to-device connectivity to the UK Emergency Services Network, aiming to close rural and coastal coverage gaps and provide resilient messaging and location services when terrestrial networks fall short.

Arianespace to launch first batch of Amazon Leo satellites with the first Ariane 64, on February 12, 2026 [link]
Arianespace announced that the first Ariane 64 flight (VA267) is scheduled for Feb 12, 2026 from French Guiana, deploying 32 Amazon Leo satellites and kicking off a planned 18-launch series for the constellation.

Tomorrow.io Announces $175M Financing to Deploy DeepSky, The World’s First AI-Native Weather Satellite Constellation [link]
Tomorrow.io announced a $175M financing round to accelerate deployment of DeepSky, described as an AI native weather satellite constellation designed to increase atmospheric observation density and refresh rates for forecasting and decision intelligence, building on its first 13 satellite constellation that it says already delivers 60 minute global revisit.

Vantor Wins NGA Luno B Contract to Deliver AI-Powered Global Change Detection [link]
Vantor won a $5.3M National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency Luno B contract to deliver AI-powered global change detection by fusing data from multiple satellite constellations, including electro optical and SAR, to rapidly flag terrain and land cover changes and help keep NGA mapping products up to date for missions ranging from disaster response to conflict monitoring.

Brazil’s Amazonia-1B Satellite to Be Launched Aboard Vega C [link]
Brazil’s INPE selected SpaceLaunch to fly the Amazonia-1B Earth observation satellite on Avio’s Vega C in 2027, expanding Brazil’s capability to monitor Amazon deforestation and support national agricultural mapping.

Singapore to set up national space agency on April 1 to develop and run space capabilities [link]
Singapore will launch the National Space Agency of Singapore on April 1, bringing satellite tasking, geospatial analytics, and space-safety capabilities under one national hub.

ExoAnalytic to build fire tracking visualisation tools for Earth Fire Alliance [link]
ExoAnalytic will develop visualization tools for Earth Fire Alliance’s FireSat, letting users see real-time and upcoming satellite tracks plus the 1,500-km swath footprints as the system expands beyond the March 2025 protoflight built by Muon Space.

From Satellite to Production Site: A Pilot Project for Integrating AI into Global Supply Chain Mapping [link]
Open Supply Hub and Earth Genome are running a 12-month pilot funded by Patrick J. McGovern Foundation to use satellite imagery + the Earth Index and a human-in-the-loop workflow to uncover and verify previously unmapped production sites, expanding open supply-chain transparency.

Exotrail and Astroscale France join forces to build deorbiting capability for LEO [link]
French startups Exotrail and Astroscale France have partnered on a France 2030–backed plan to demo a LEO deorbiting mission—combining Exotrail’s service vehicle with Astroscale’s rendezvous/proximity tech, pending government selection (decision expected by summer 2026) with a target launch around 2030.

constellr launches commercial partnership with Japan’s premier space solutions provider SKY Perfect JSAT [link]
SKY Perfect JSAT and constellr announced a commercial partnership to sell constellr’s high-resolution thermal infrared satellite data in Japan via SKY Perfect JSAT, with use cases including urban heat monitoring, wildfire detection, and infrastructure and maritime activity monitoring.

Europe’s digital Earth gets ready to grow user community [link]
Destination Earth (DestinE) is preparing to widen access ahead of Phase 3 (starting July 2026), with ESA (platform/services), EUMETSAT (data lake/edge) and ECMWF (digital twins/engine) planning a faster, more user-oriented platform from June 2026, an open call to add services, and continued growth beyond the 5,000+ current users.

Launch of the new Rapid Mapping Viewer [link]
Copernicus EMS is launched a redesigned Rapid Mapping Viewer, adding in-app stats, activation API links, a new topographic basemap, and full mobile support while keeping all existing features.

Developer's Orbit

“annual” EO embeddings can capture sub-annual signals [link]
This could as well be a standalone blog post (and/or a published paper):
Samuel Barrett and Madeline Lisaius argue that “annual” EO embeddings can still preserve sub-annual signals, because the training objective encourages the model to encode salient events even when observations are sparse.
The practical takeaway is: if full-year embeddings already perform well, don’t over-specialise; and if you truly need in-season representations, you’ll likely need a model trained for that window, not just fewer input dates.

EnMAP-Box 3.17.1 is now available for download [link]
EnMAP-Box 3.17.1 is now available, adding a new Spectral Index Explorer for one-click index previews plus a revamped, more capable spectral library viewer with an interactive legend.

Introducing Async-GeoTIFF [link]
Async-GeoTIFF is a new high-level Python library for reading GeoTIFFs and COGs with async I/O, designed to make concurrent cloud reads faster and easier.

Improved forest carbon estimation with AlphaEarth Foundations and Airborne LiDAR data [link]
John Kilbride shared a workflow on the Google Earth / Earth Engine blog showing how to combine AlphaEarth Foundations embedding fields with airborne LiDAR to map forest structure for carbon monitoring and verification. They argue the embeddings can replace a lot of the usual satellite preprocessing and data-fusion overhead, making it easier to build repeatable, scalable mapping pipelines.

Data

NISAR Sample Data Products Available [link]
NASA and ISRO have released 25 sample NISAR Level 1–3 L-band data products to help users test workflows ahead of larger releases later in 2026, noting the datasets are not yet fully calibrated and include known artifacts and limitations discoverable via Earthdata Search and Vertex.

Related:
Available NISAR Data [link]

NASA and CNES Release Unprecedented Global River Discharge and Water Quality Estimates [link]
NASA and CNES released new SWOT Level 4 global river discharge and suspended-sediment estimates (including a consensus “SWOT Discharge”), generated with the open-source Confluence framework and now available via PO.DAAC and NASA Earthdata Search.

Land Surface Phenology V2: a new global reference for monitoring vegetation dynamics [link]
Copernicus Land Monitoring Service Land Surface Phenology V2 (LSP V2) is a new global 300 m annual dataset (released each March) that harmonises PROBA-V (2014–2018) and Copernicus Sentinel-3 OLCI (2019–present) to deliver 13 consistent, PPI-based vegetation seasonality metrics with quality flags for monitoring climate impacts on ecosystems, drought, agriculture, and biodiversity worldwide.

Expanding access to Met Office data through the Microsoft Planetary Computer [link]
The Met Office has published its UK deterministic (2 km) and global deterministic (10 km) forecast datasets on Microsoft’s Planetary Computer. The release includes the latest forecasts plus a two-year archive of prior forecasts (over 600 TB), catalogued with STAC for easier discovery and programmatic access.

Landsat 8 and 9 data available in Copernicus Browser [link]
Copernicus Browser now includes ongoing Landsat 8 & 9 imagery, adding long-term optical + thermal observations (OLI/TIRS) as a complement to Sentinel-2, with Level-1 archive access from 2021 onward for viewing and quantitative analysis.

Planet’s Open STAC Catalog now has newly released open hyperspectral data [link]
~100 new scenes with expanded global coverage, improved metadata, three new application categories, full core imagery assets, plus methane and max-sensitivity examples for select GHG scenes.

CMIP6 Climate Projections Now Live in Earth Data Hub as Zarr Datasets [link]
Earth Data Hub now serves CMIP6 climate-model projections as ready-to-use Zarr datasets, starting with ~3TB of daily historical + ScenarioMIP data for six widely used models, so you can explore scenarios interactively with just Xarray/Zarr (plus a tutorial + repo), with more models planned.

• CMIP6 climate-model projectionsd [link]

• Use case: CMIP6 Temperature Timeseries extraction [link]

constellr thermal data now accessible via ESA Third Party Missions programme [link]
constellr’s SkyBee-1 and SkyBee-2 thermal infrared data is now available for non-commercial scientific research via ESA’s Third Party Missions programme, giving researchers access to operational land-surface temperature products through an ESA Announcement of Opportunity.

Snapshots

Europe’s next-generation weather satellite sends back first images [link]
"The first images from the Meteosat Third Generation-Sounder satellite have been shared at the European Space Conference in Brussels, showing how the mission will provide data on temperature and humidity, for more accurate weather forecasting over Europe and northern Africa."

Related:
See into Earth’s atmosphere like never before [link]

Interesting read

Visions of Earth Intelligence [link]
Bruno Sanchez-Andrade Nuño argues that “Earth Intelligence” is less about collecting more satellite data and more about reducing the effort to answer “where is what” questions at planetary scale. He compares agentic workflows, embedding-based compression, and retrieval-first indexing, and makes the case that treating embeddings as an index can enable faster, cheaper discovery; then hand off to heavier models when deeper validation is needed.

Predicting Earth Observations [link]
Development Seed introduced EO Predictor, a map-first tool that estimates where and when upcoming Earth observations may occur over the next 48 hours, using orbit data (via CelesTrak) and an automated pipeline to help users, especially disaster responders, find relevant imagery faster.

The curious case of why methane spiked around Covid [link]
ESA highlights a new Science study led by Philippe Ciais that reconstructs the 2019–2023 methane budget and explains why methane rose so sharply in 2020–2022, then slowed. The study points to a temporary dip in the atmosphere’s methane “sink” (lower hydroxyl radicals during lockdown-era chemistry changes) alongside higher wetland emissions under unusual climate conditions, with fossil fuels and wildfires playing a smaller role in that spike.

Related:
Paper: Why methane surged in the atmosphere during the early 2020s [link]

How the EU Space Programme supports agriculture [link]
How the EU Space Programme supports agriculture, from CAP parcel monitoring with Sentinel 1 and Sentinel 2 to drought tracking and precision farming enabled by Galileo and EGNOS, with practical examples of how satellite data is making subsidy checks, water management, and farm operations more efficient and sustainable.

15 years of TanDEM-X – DLR’s pioneering Earth observation mission celebrates its anniversary [link]
DLR marks 15 years since TanDEM-X began operational acquisitions in December 2010 to generate a global digital elevation model that has since become a topographic reference, including as the freely accessible Copernicus DEM released in 2016. The mission flies the twin satellites TerraSAR-X (15 June 2007) and TanDEM-X (21 June 2010) in close formation for interferometric radar measurements, which are processed at Oberpfaffenhofen into a consistent global DEM with one-metre absolute vertical accuracy on a 12 m grid. Although designed for five years, the satellites have continued operating, enabling additional coverages and DEM change maps via DLR EOC Geoservice, with an independent 2017–2020 DEM planned via the TanDEM-X Science System from early 2026. Airbus Defence and Space markets the data commercially, while DLR is also outlining successor concepts such as MirrorSAR to improve DEM accuracy further.

For better winter weather forecasts – HALO measurement flights over the North Atlantic [link]
An international research team has started the NAWDIC field campaign to improve winter weather forecasting by collecting high-detail observations over the North Atlantic, a region where routine measurements are limited. Using DLR’s HALO aircraft, equipped with lidar instruments including WALES (water vapour) and the first-use HEDWIG (wind) payload, the project will record continuous vertical profiles of wind, ozone, and humidity between the aircraft and the surface. The six-week campaign, launched on 13 January 2026 with flights based from Shannon Airport in Ireland, focuses on processes such as dry intrusions that can influence storms, heavy rainfall, and cold spells downstream across Western Europe, with the goal of feeding better observations into weather and climate models.

Arctic Weather Satellite paves way for constellation [link]
ESA’s Arctic Weather Satellite (launched Aug 2024) has proven the small-satellite approach and delivered microwave radiometer humidity/temperature data that ECMWF deemed so good it is being assimilated into forecasts. EUMETSAT confirmed the Polar System – Sterna constellation will go forward with first launches planned for 2029 (six satellites plus spares, replenished to deliver data to at least 2042).

Podcasts

EOcafe: ESA CM25 outcomes and opportunities: what’s next for the EO industry?

Scene From Above: S15E4: What “cloud-friendly” really means for Earth observation [link]
In a Scene from Above interview, Development Seed data engineer Aimee Barciauskas explains that “cloud-friendly” Earth data is about network-optimized delivery and the surrounding ecosystem (metadata, indexes, libraries, interfaces), not just putting files in the cloud. Drawing on work with NASA’s ODSI/IMPACT, MAAP, and VEDA, she also highlights community efforts (Pangeo, CNG, ESIP) and the push toward more reproducible workflows.

• Listen to the full episode: [link]

• Watch the episode on YouTube: [link]

LinkedIn Highlights

The GeoTIFF: The Raster That Survived the ‘90s [link]

Some thoughts on AI writing [link]
"Reading something that is imperfect is a real treat these days."

Call for Abstracts

EarthCARE Science and Validation Workshop 2026 [link]
Deadline 27 February 2026

Upcoming Events

Announcing Sprints to Define Best Practices for Earth Observation Vector Embeddings [link]
"CNG, Planet, and Clark University are convening a two-day in-person sprint on March 10-11, 2026 at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts focused on defining patterns and best practices for Earth observation (EO) vector embeddings. The goal of this sprint is to collaboratively draft and align on a practical specification that can be tested, extended, and adopted by the broader EO community."

CDSE Webinar: Creating scalable EO workflows with CDSE, EarthCODE, and APEx [link]
A webinar on how Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem works with EarthCODE and APEx to move from tested EO experiments to scalable services via openEO, presented by VITO’s Bram Janssen.

Learning

First Basemap [link]
This step-by-step class shows how to generate a global interactive map using OpenStreetMap and PMTiles, powered by GitHub Actions and Amazon Web Services, then style and ship it with MapLibre.

Introduction to GDAL’s New Command Line Interface

5th NASA ICESat-2 data training webinar: "Laser Altimetry Applications for a Changing World: Working with ICESat-2 Inland Surface Water Data" [link]

• Presentation Slides - Part 1: Introduction to ICESat-2 Data Training Webinar Series [link]

• Presentation Slides - Part 2: Overview of ICESat-2 Inland Surface Water Products (ATL13 and ATL22) [link]

• Presentation Slides - Part 3: ICESat-2 Data Access and Analysis with icepyx [link]

• Jupyter Notebook icepyx demo [link]

• View recording [link]

Satellogic Signs $18MM USD Agreement with Portugal to Deliver Two Mark V High-Resolution Satellites [link]
Satellogic signed an $18M agreement with Portugal’s CEiiA, the Centre of Engineering and Product Development in Portugal, to deliver and deploy two 50 cm-class NewSat Mark V satellites, strengthening Portugal’s and Europe’s sovereign Earth-observation capabilities.

The satellites, part of the Atlantic Constellation, will transfer to Portuguese ownership and operational control in Q2 2026, with over 85% European-sourced components and a built-in knowledge-transfer program.

SkyFi Integrates Vantor Imagery and Analytics for On-Demand Earth Intelligence [link]
SkyFi has integrated Vantor into its platform, enabling on-demand tasking and access to high-resolution satellite imagery, archives, and analytics. The partnership expands access to Vantor’s spatial content through SkyFi’s self-service tools, supporting use cases across defense, disaster response, urban planning, and infrastructure monitoring.

SkyFi Secures $12.7M Series A [link]
SkyFi has closed a $12.7 million oversubscribed Series A round to accelerate product development and expand access to satellite imagery and analytics. The round was co-led by Buoyant Ventures and IronGate Capital Advisors, with participation from several new and existing investors.

The funding will support improvements to SkyFi’s platform, including UI and analytics, and deeper partnerships with satellite operators.

Hydrosat Raises $60M in Series B Funding to Accelerate Growth [link]
Hydrosat has closed a $60 million Series B funding round to accelerate growth across commercial, civil government, and defense markets. The round was led by Hartree Partners, Subutai Capital Partners, and Space 4 Earth, with new participation from Truffle Capital and continued support from existing investors.

The funding will support global expansion and the next phase of Hydrosat’s thermal infrared constellation, which already delivers daily, field-scale temperature insights for water management, agriculture, and drought monitoring. With two satellites in orbit and AI-driven analytics, Hydrosat is positioning thermal data as core infrastructure for managing water stress, food security, and climate risk worldwide.

Planet Signs 9-Figure Deal with Sweden [link]
Planet signed a multi-year, low nine-figure contract with the Swedish Armed Forces to deliver a dedicated suite of satellites, high-resolution data, and intelligence solutions for national security.

It is Planet’s third Satellite Services deal in 12 months, bringing total contracted value to over $500M across Sweden, Japan, and Germany, and reinforcing its rapidly deployed, sovereign EO model.

Eartheye Space Signs Asia-Pacific Contract for Multi-Sensor Earth Observation [link]
Eartheye Space has signed a contract with an Asia-Pacific customer to deliver a large-scale situational awareness capability using hundreds of Earth observation satellites. The partnership provides multi-sensor tasking with enterprise and tip-and-cue workflows, including imaging and non-imaging sensors, with imaging resolutions starting at 15 cm.

CNES Awards Loft Orbital Contract for French Radar Imaging Demo [link]
CNES has awarded a €50 million contract to a consortium led by Loft Orbital to develop DESIR, a synthetic aperture radar Earth observation demonstrator aimed at strengthening France’s sovereign radar imaging capabilities. The project brings together Thales Alenia Space for the SAR payload and user ground segment, and TEKEVER France for the active antenna, with the satellite expected to enter service in early 2029 and operate for at least two years.

ICEYE expands SAR intelligence support for Ukraine [link]
ICEYE has announced an expanded cooperation agreement with the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine, increasing the volume of high-resolution SAR imagery delivered to support tactical situational awareness.

The agreement builds on ICEYE’s support to Ukraine since 2022 and further integrates space-based intelligence into operational decision-making. The expanded access leverages ICEYE’s Gen4 SAR constellation, offering imagery at resolutions down to 16 cm.

Pinkmatter Europe Rebrands as FarEarth Labs [link]
Pinkmatter Europe has rebranded as FarEarth Labs, sharpening its focus exclusively on the FarEarth platform for sensor calibration and operational image processing.

Sentinel-2A and Sentinel-2B Tandem Acquisitions [link]
From 13 January to 08 March 2026, Sentinel-2A will pause its nominal acquisition mode to fly in a tandem configuration with Sentinel-2B, allowing both satellites to image the same targets under near-identical conditions, only ~30 seconds apart. This rare setup generates a high-quality reference dataset for fine-scale radiometric calibration across the constellation.

The campaign aims to complete the radiometric characterization of Sentinel-2 by tightening inter-satellite consistency, building on the earlier Sentinel-2A/2C cross-calibration during Sentinel-2C’s commissioning. Tandem data from both satellites will be disseminated through the Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem between 2 and 22 February 2026, ensuring improved radiometric robustness for all downstream Copernicus applications.

NOAA Deploys New AI Driven Global Weather Models [link]
NOAA has operationally deployed a new suite of AI-driven global weather models, including AIGFS, AIGEFS, and the hybrid HGEFS, delivering faster forecasts, improved tropical cyclone guidance, and better representation of uncertainty with lower computational cost. Developed under Project EAGLE with support from the Earth Prediction Innovation Center, the models combine machine learning and physics-based approaches to advance next-generation operational weather prediction.

Arianespace to launch first Ariane 64 rocket on 12 Feb [link]
Arianespace will fly the first Ariane 6 mission in its four-booster Ariane 64 configuration on 12 February from the Guiana Space Centre. The launch marks a major milestone for the European launcher, doubling payload capacity compared to Ariane 62 and inaugurating both the 20-metre fairing and the start of Amazon’s broadband constellation deployment under an 18-flight contract.

Avio to Launch Four Earth Observation Satellites for Taiwan [link]
Taiwan Space Agency has awarded Avio a contract to launch four Earth observation satellites from its FORMOSAT programme aboard Vega C rockets. The missions will deploy two high-resolution optical satellites from FORMOSAT-8 and two SAR satellites from FORMOSAT-9, all launching from the Guiana Space Centre, further reinforcing Vega C’s role in international Earth observation missions following its return to flight.

Pixxel-Led Consortium Signs Agreement with IN-SPACe to Build India’s National EO Constellation [link]
Pixxel has signed an agreement with IN-SPACe to design, build, and operate India’s first privately led national Earth observation constellation under a public–private partnership.

The $150M program will deploy 12 multimodal satellites over five years, spanning optical, multispectral, SAR, and hyperspectral imaging. Led by Pixxel with Dhruva Space, PierSight, and Satsure, the constellation will serve Indian government needs while also supporting global commercial applications across agriculture, energy, environment, and infrastructure.

Polish Space Sector Achieves First Profitable Year Amid Record ESA Investment [link]
Poland’s space sector recorded its first combined annual profit in 2025, reflecting increased commercial activity, driven by defence procurement and higher national investment in European Space Agency programmes. Flagship initiatives such as the MikroSAR programme with ICEYE and a €731 million ESA commitment for 2026–2028 are positioning Poland as a regional hub for sovereign Earth observation, security, and dual-use space capabilities in Central and Eastern Europe.

ESA invites EO companies to help build parametric insurance products [link]
European Space Agency and Liberty Mutual Reinsurance have launched a three-year collaboration to explore how Earth observation data can underpin parametric insurance for terrestrial assets. The initiative focuses on climate-driven risks such as wildfires, windstorms, and forest damage, with the goal of triggering automated payouts based on satellite and environmental data rather than manual loss assessments.

For European EO and analytics companies, this is a concrete opportunity. ESA-backed support and funding will help bring market-ready insurance solutions forward, with an open call for SAR, optical, AI, and modelling providers to contribute. It is another signal that EO data is moving from “nice to have” to core infrastructure in the insurance sector.

ESA sets out a packed 2026 agenda backed by a record €8.26B budget [link]
European Space Agency has set out its 2026 plans following record €22B+ commitments from member states. The agency will deploy an €8.26B budget, with Earth observation (€2.44B) leading spend, followed by navigation, secure connectivity, exploration, and launch systems.

Key milestones include the first Ariane 64 launch, multiple EO and weather missions, and major data releases from Euclid and Gaia. With funding secured, 2026 is about execution and delivery across Europe’s civil, scientific, and strategic space programs.

Developer's Orbit

NASA Earthdata QGIS Plugin [link]
"A QGIS plugin for searching, visualizing, and downloading NASA Earthdata products. This plugin provides access to NASA’s Earth science data catalog directly within QGIS, supporting Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF (COG) visualization and data footprint display."

Landsat Water Mask QGIS plugin v1.4.2 is live [link]
The Landsat Water Mask QGIS plugin has been updated to version 1.4.2 and is available in the in-app plugin store for QGIS. The release expands functionality on Windows and macOS, adds improved land–water polygons, and introduces a new “occurrence over time” view that uses 45 years of Landsat data to visualise long-term flooding patterns and river dynamics in a single image.

A Gentle Introduction to GDAL Part 10: Python & the Command Line [link]
Robert Simmon walks through a practical way to "drive" GDAL with Python, showing how pathlib can replace shell-style filename handling and how subprocess can run tools like gdal_translate and gdaldem in loops.

New openEO QGIS plugin has been released [link]
openEO released a fully rewritten QGIS plugin, redesigned for deeper integration with the QGIS Browser and broader support for openEO API 1.x backends. The new version improves authentication, resource browsing, visualization of batch results and services, STAC interoperability, and bulk data download, and is available via the QGIS plugin manager for QGIS 3.40+ (with expected QGIS 4.0 compatibility).

Zarr-Cesium [link]
"The Zarr-Cesium Visualization Toolkit provides CesiumJS data providers for rendering n-dimensional datasets stored in the Zarr format — streamed directly from cloud object stores (HTTP/S3/GCS) without preprocessing, conversion, or a backend server."

MTG FRP Fire Progression Analyzer [link]
"Python script for creating hourly and cumulative fire progression polygons from MTG (Meteosat Third Generation) FRP (Fire Radiative Power) data, with calibration against reference burned areas"

Polytope: navigating the DestinE digital twins data deluge [link]
"Springer’s Journal of Big Data has recently published a paper featuring Polytope, ECMWF’s user-facing data service for Destination Earth digital twins data. The paper led by ECMWF’s scientist Mathilde Leuridan and co-authored by James Hawkes, Simon Smart, Emanuele Danovaro, Tiago Quintino (ECMWF) and Martin Schultz (FZ Juelich), presents Polytope’s new feature extraction. This functionality enables users to retrieve only the bytes of data they need from the vast volumes of weather and climate data produced by the Digital Twins."

Earth Data Hub Updates ERA5 Zarr Catalogue Through 2025, Reaching Over 2 PB of Open Climate Data [link]
The Earth Data Hub has updated all ERA5 Zarr datasets through the end of 2025, offering more than 2 PB of open climate data accessible directly with Xarray. The catalogue includes ERA5 single levels, pressure levels, ocean and wave variables, and the full ERA5-Land dataset, produced by ECMWF and delivered via the DestinE Platform, funded by European Space Agency.

Alongside the update of all ERA5 Zarr datasets through the end of 2025, the Earth Data Hub provides a clear, practical Getting Started notebook that shows how to work with these multi-hundred-terabyte datasets efficiently using Xarray, Zarr, and Dask.

Getting started with the Earth Data Hub [link]

Data

CropClimateX: A Large-Scale, Climate-Aware Dataset for Crop Monitoring in the US (2018–2022) [link]
CropClimateX is a new large-scale, multimodal dataset designed to link crop dynamics with weather variability, drought, and climate extremes across the contiguous United States from 2018 to 2022. It combines multi-sensor satellite data, climate and extreme-event indicators, and agricultural targets into 15,500 ML-ready minicubes, supporting research on climate-aware crop monitoring, sensor fusion, and generalizable geospatial models.

Repository: https://github.com/drnhhl/CropClimateX
Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-026-06611-x
Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/datasets/torchgeo/CropClimateX

Sentinel-2A Twilight and Night Acquisitions over the European Arctic (January 2026) [link]
Sentinel-2A sample acquisitions under low-illumination, twilight, and night conditions are available over the European Arctic (Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Greenland) on CDSE for 2–12 January 2026.

The image illustrates the geographic coverage of these acquisitions.

SARLO-80: Worldwide Slant SAR Language Optic Dataset - 80cm [link]
SARLO-80 is a newly released open dataset providing ~120k paired Umbra SAR and high-resolution optical images at 80 cm resolution, all represented in slant-range SAR geometry. Each image pair is accompanied by three automatically generated text captions of varying length, enabling multimodal research across SAR, optical imagery, and vision–language models. The dataset is openly available on Hugging Face and was developed by ONERA in collaboration with Umbra.

Copernicus Marine launches global coastal satellite-derived bathymetry [link]
Copernicus Marine Service has released new global coastal satellite-derived bathymetry products, providing 100 m resolution depth estimates for coastal waters worldwide. The datasets combine intertidal, optical, and wave-kinematics methods and include per-pixel uncertainty and method traceability, supporting applications from coastal management and climate research to maritime safety and Blue Economy planning.

How To: Generating Climate Engine Site Characterization Reports for Custom Areas of Interest [link]
Climate Engine launched a web tool that lets users generate site characterization reports for any AOI in the U.S. lower 48, using RAP, gridMET, and multi-scalar drought indices.

Reports can be created from priority regions, uploaded shapefiles, or drawn polygons, and are delivered by email with full datasets, figures, and PDF outputs for land, climate, and drought analysis.

So2Sat LCZ42 Dataset [link]

• 400,000+ Sentinel-1 & Sentinel-2 patch pairs

• 42 major cities + 10 additional areas worldwide

• 17 LCZ classes, labeled through a rigorous expert workflow

• label uncertainty via independent expert votes

ORBITaL-Net Training Library for Building Extraction [link]

Sargassum Detection: Copernicus Marine launches New Floating Algae Product [link]
Copernicus Marine has released a new operational Sargassum detection product that provides near real-time monitoring of floating algae across the Atlantic and Caribbean. The product integrates multiple satellite sensors (Sentinel-2/3, MODIS, Landsat, GOES) and uses the Floating Algae Index to deliver daily, multi-resolution maps that support early warning, drift modelling, and research on large-scale bloom dynamics.

msuav500k: Foundational Dataset for Multispectral and RGB UAV Imagery [link]
"The msuav500k dataset is a comprehensive collection of 598,300 curated UAV images designed for computer vision and remote sensing applications. This foundational dataset addresses critical interoperability challenges in UAV-based multispectral imaging by providing standardized, radiometrically calibrated imagery from multiple sensor platforms.

Dataset Composition:

• 443,017 RGB images from 14 agricultural and environmental monitoring projects (2020-2025)

• 136,652 aligned multispectral-RGB image pairs from 7 projects (2022-2024)

• 18,629 multispectral-only images from 13 projects (2017-2022)

• Total size: 185GB processed data"

Paper: msuav500k: Foundational dataset for multispectral and RGB uncrewed aerial vehicle imagery [link]

NYC Stormwater Flood Maps [link]
"A collection of citywide Geographic Information System (GIS) layers that show areas of potential flooding scenarios under varying sea level rise conditions.

This collection contains the following NYC Stormwater Flood Maps:

• NYC Stormwater Flood Map - Extreme Flood (3.66 inches/hr) with 2080 Sea Level Rise

• NYC Stormwater Flood Map - Moderate Flood (2.13 inches/hr) with 2050 Sea Level Rise

• NYC Stormwater Flood Map - Moderate Flood (2.13 inches/hr) with Current Sea Levels

• NYC Stormwater Flood Map - Limited Flood (1.77 inches/hr) with Current Sea Levels"

Sen12Landslides: A Spatio-Temporal Dataset for Satellite-Based Landslide and Anomaly Detection [link]
"Sen12Landslides, a large-scale, multi-sensor benchmark for spatio-temporal landslide and anomaly detection. It comprises 39,556 NetCDF patches (128×128 px with 10m resolution) spanning 15 time steps, derived from both Sentinel-1 (VV, VH; ascending/descending) and Sentinel-2 (10 spectral bands B02–B12). "

GitHube Repo: https://github.com/PaulH97/Sen12Landslides
Paper: A Spatio-Temporal Dataset for Satellite-Based Landslide Detection [link]

Snapshots

A Plume of Bright Blue in Melissa’s Wake [link]
Hurricane Melissa resuspended carbonate sediments from Pedro Bank south of Jamaica, producing what scientists believe is the largest such event observed in the satellite record. MODIS imagery captured bright blue waters caused by suspended calcium carbonate mud stirred up by the Category 5 storm, revealing surface currents and sediment transport patterns across an area more than three times the size of Jamaica. While the visual signal faded within days, researchers note potential longer-term impacts on benthic ecosystems and emphasize the role of such events in transferring carbon from shallow marine sediments to the deep ocean.

Interesting read

Towards mutualism: reconciling differences between field and EO data [link]
In this thoughtful essay, Planet scientist Chris Anderson argues that field data and Earth observation should be treated as complementary, not competing, ways of understanding nature. He makes the case that satellite data is a fundamentally different measurement system, best evaluated through uncertainty-aware aggregation and fusion with field plots, rather than pixel-level comparison. The post outlines a path toward a “mutualistic” future where field campaigns and satellites reinforce each other, improving both ecological science and large-scale decision-making.

New interactive map shows how flammable your part of Australia is right now [link]
Geoscience Australia has launched a new interactive map that shows how dry and flammable vegetation is across Australia in near real time, using high-resolution satellite data from Sentinel-2 and machine-learning models.

The tool turns satellite light measurements into 20-metre maps of fuel moisture, helping fire agencies, Indigenous fire practitioners, insurers, and planners see where landscapes are ready to burn and where they are not, enabling earlier and more targeted fire prevention.

Explore the interactive map here.

Quantifying local climate regulation in three Estonian cities [link]
Estonia used Copernicus tree cover, evapotranspiration, and land surface temperature data to map how much urban vegetation cools three cities, Tallinn, Tartu, and Narva, producing 30 m maps of local climate regulation.

The study shows that forests, parks, and green spaces create measurable cooling zones across cities and provides a first quantitative basis for including urban nature in national ecosystem service accounting and urban planning.

Regional assessment of above-ground biomass using field, airborne light detection and ranging and satellite data integration [link]
FAO published a methodological study on estimating above-ground biomass in West Africa by integrating field plots, UAV LiDAR, and NASA’s GEDI satellite data.

The work focuses on producing consistent regional biomass estimates in areas with limited forest inventory data.

Tiny patches of deforestation drive tropical carbon loss [link]
A new study published in Nature shows that small, incremental forest clearings, often under two hectares, drive more than half of net tropical carbon losses despite accounting for only a small fraction of disturbed area. Using high resolution satellite biomass data, the research shows how cumulative human activities, rather than large scale deforestation alone, are reshaping the tropical carbon balance.

Japan’s FOSS4G Community: An Introduction to OSGeo Japan & OpenStreetMap Japan [link]
With FOSS4G 2026 heading to Hiroshima, this article offers a timely look at how Japan’s open geospatial ecosystem took shape. It traces the growth of OSGeo Japan and OpenStreetMap Japan, showing how regionally rooted FOSS4G activities, citizen mapping, and open data have combined into a resilient, nationally connected community.

LinkedIn Highlights

Rethinking Early-Career Engineering in an AI-Native World [link]
A sharp reflection from Shay Strong, VP of Analytics at ICEYE, on what it actually means to hire and grow engineers in an AI-native world. Less talk about productivity gains, more focus on judgment, ownership, and how AI can genuinely compress the “junior” phase when we rethink hiring and mentoring.

Upcoming Events

Short Course - Using EUMETView and Jupyter Notebooks to depict a Dust Event [link]
On 10 February 2026, EUMETSAT will host a short online course demonstrating how to detect and analyse dust events using EUMETView and Jupyter Notebooks. The session walks through a complete workflow, from visual identification of dust plumes to interactive analysis of Sentinel-3 SLSTR AOD and Copernicus Climate Change Service IASI-based dust optical depth products.

RGS-IBG AIC 2026 • Geospatial Artificial intelligence methods and applications [link]
The RGS-IBG GIScience Research Group has opened a call for abstracts for a 2026 conference session on Geospatial Artificial Intelligence methods and applications, focusing on advances in GeoAI theory, methods, and real-world use. The session invites work spanning foundation models, uncertainty, causality, ethics, and reproducibility in GIScience and quantitative geography, with abstracts due 23 February 2026.

GeoAI 2026 Submission Deadline Extended to 3 February 2026 [link]
The submission deadline for GeoAI 2026 has been extended to 3 February 2026 for extended abstracts and the published-article track, following strong community interest.

Understanding Climate Data: From analysis of the past to future projections [link]
Copernicus Climate Change Service is launching an eight-hour, self-paced online course in February 2026 that teaches professionals how to understand and use climate data in their work.

The course introduces observations, reanalysis, seasonal forecasts, and climate projections, and shows how to access and interpret these datasets through the C3S Climate Data Store so users across sectors like energy, finance, planning, and policy can apply climate information with confidence.

Call for expressions of interest: Earth observation case studies for the 2026 CEOS Earth Observation Handbook on Adaptation and Resilience [link]
The call targets practical examples where satellite EO supports climate adaptation, risk reduction, and National Adaptation Plan processes across sectors such as water, agriculture, health, ecosystems, and infrastructure.

Expressions of interest close on 31 January 2026, with publication planned ahead of COP31.

Learning

TerraBytes Processings Now Available in Proceedings of Machine Learning Research (PMLR) [link]
"Earth Observation presents unique challenges for machine learning due to its non-stationary data distribution, spatio-temporal biases, and multimodal nature. TerraBytes aims to address these challenges by fostering discussions at the intersection of data curation, machine learning, and remote sensing. The workshop focuses on (1) curating less biased, globally representative EO datasets, (2) developing adaptable ML models for EO applications, and (3) bridging the gap between data acquisition and ML communities. By promoting interdisciplinary collaboration, TerraBytes seeks to advance EO research and enable inclusive, fair, and impactful applications."

Watch the workshop online here.

Presentations From VH-RODA 2025 Now Available [link]
All talks from the November 2025 workshop in Frascati have been published, covering calibration and validation across optical, thermal, SAR, atmospheric composition, and related domains.

Looking back, Earth Observation did not lack progress in 2025. Instead, the year exposed a growing mismatch between a sector that continued to describe itself as broadly commercial and one shaped by defence-led demand.

Those trends had been visible for years: defence alignment, AI everywhere, and commercial consolidation. In 2025, most major announcements revolved around them.

Budgets made priorities explicit

In Europe, Earth Observation was treated unambiguously as strategic infrastructure. The ESA Ministerial Council committed a record €22.3 billion, including €1.2 billion allocated to European Resilience from Space. While environmental monitoring sits at the core of Europe’s EO identity, this programme was framed primarily around surveillance, security, and system resilience, explicitly positioning Earth Observation as a sovereign capability.

Across the Atlantic, the picture was far less stable. The proposed FY2026 U.S. budget introduced deep uncertainty for civilian Earth Observation, with substantial cuts targeting NASA Earth Science, NOAA, and the USGS. Landsat Next, long assumed to be institutionally inevitable, became politically fragile.

This was not a universal retreat. Defence-oriented geospatial procurement in the United States remained aggressively funded. The contrast lay in how Earth Observation outside national security was positioned. Europe treated Earth Observation as a core component of strategic autonomy. The United States appeared undecided about Earth Observation as a civilian public good.

Earth Observation organised around defence contracts

Over the course of 2025, it became difficult to ignore how deeply the sector was entrenching itself into defence and intelligence procurement. This shift was not simply about defence becoming a larger customer, but about defence contracts shaping how systems were designed, funded, evaluated, and prioritised.

As defence procurement logic became more influential, expectations around revisit, latency, automation, and operational responsiveness moved from being use-case specific to baseline design assumptions.

In parallel, purely commercial, non-defence B2B offerings became harder to justify and sustain, not because they lacked value, but because they operated under very different procurement and investment rationales.

Defence demand was no longer simply a growing segment of the market. It had become the reference point around which much of the sector organised itself. According to industry analysts, defence-related demand now accounts for close to half of the Earth Observation market, particularly when data services and value-added analytics are included. Critically, this growth concentrated in precisely the segments that influence constellation design, tasking strategy, and downstream operational workflows.

This orientation was visible across the year’s major contracts: large commercial data awards by the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, long-term sovereign agreements across the Middle East and Asia, and a steady expansion of EO offerings explicitly aligned with national security requirements.

It was also reflected in the year’s most visible commercial announcements. Planet’s Pelican agreement with SKY Perfect JSAT reinforced where high-resolution capacity is being positioned and financed. BlackSky’s Gen-3 contracts and product direction tied high-resolution monitoring closely to automated analytics and operational delivery. Maxar’s reorganisation and rebranding, emphasising sovereign defence capabilities and long-term government relationships, carried the same signal. Individually, none of these moves were surprising. Collectively, they made the market’s centre of gravity harder to deny.

Here, the increasing prominence of “dual-use” framing deserves careful interpretation. In practice, dual-use rarely functioned as a balanced operating model between civil and military objectives. Instead, it served as a framing mechanism, allowing systems and missions to be presented as broadly applicable while being justified, evaluated, and funded primarily through defence-driven requirements.

That distinction matters because it shapes what is funded first. Speed, responsiveness, and actionability were consistently prioritised ahead of calibration, interoperability, and long-term continuity. These latter qualities were not removed from Earth Observation, but they were more often deferred, positioned as secondary concerns to be addressed once operational demands were met.

The practical consequence is that non-defence, non-intelligence B2B Earth Observation now occupies a narrower space. That space still exists, but operating within it requires far more deliberate positioning than before.

Some non-defence segments shifted further downstream, with EO operating as one component inside broader analytical or operational systems rather than as a standalone product, with value realised at the workflow level rather than the data layer.

Launches told the same story from orbit

From a technical standpoint, 2025 was a strong year for Earth Observation.

Institutionally, continuity and precision were central. Copernicus extended its backbone with the launches of Sentinel-1D, Sentinel-5A, and Sentinel-6B, while Sentinel-1C completed commissioning. These missions reinforced long-term measurement priorities and the value of sustained, calibrated observation.

Commercially, however, the emphasis was different. BlackSky’s Gen-3 satellites pushed optical resolution to 35 cm and were tightly integrated with automated analytics. Maxar completed deployment of the WorldView Legion constellation. Planet accelerated its Pelican launches and, notably, flew them with onboard AI compute. Pixxel placed high-resolution hyperspectral capability into orbit with the first satellites of its Fireflies constellation.

These systems are not primarily designed around comprehensive, long-term archiving of the Earth. They are designed to prioritise, filter, and act on observations quickly, in some cases before data ever reaches the ground.

The year also included a reminder of spaceflight’s inherent fragility. The loss of contact with MethaneSAT underscored both the technical difficulty of operating in orbit and the relative vulnerability of climate-first missions when compared with defence-backed programmes.

This contrast reveals how different parts of the sector absorb risk and define what counts as acceptable performance.

Looking ahead, Europe’s next generation of Sentinel missions points toward a higher reference level for institutional Earth Observation. Planned increases in spatial resolution and instrument capability do more than expand what can be observed; they implicitly redefine what is considered acceptable in terms of data quality, consistency, and continuity, particularly as public and commercial datasets are used together within the same analytical and operational workflows.

For commercial providers, this has practical consequences. Resolution alone becomes a weaker differentiator when institutional missions function as quality benchmarks. As spatial detail increases, tolerance for artefacts, misalignment, and inconsistency narrows, and attention shifts toward how data are calibrated, validated, and maintained over time. Higher resolution does not automatically translate into greater confidence; in many cases, it simply makes limitations easier to see.

As resolution increases, institutional datasets also become harder to dismiss as “coarse but free”, and in some domains they begin to function as credible reference layers. This raises the bar for commercial providers, who must increasingly justify not only higher spatial detail, but also calibration quality, consistency, and reliability over time.

AI crossed into operations, while scrutiny thinned

The most consequential AI development in Earth Observation in 2025 was not a startup launch or a product demo. It was the decision by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts to take its Artificial Intelligence Forecasting System (AIFS) into full operational use, running alongside established numerical weather prediction models.

This was not an abrupt shift. AIFS entered active service after years of benchmarking, validation, and institutional review. It was framed as complementary to physics-based models, with parallel execution enabling continuous assessment and trust-building. Reported gains, including improved tropical cyclone tracking, faster inference, and substantially lower energy consumption, were treated as empirical evidence, not marketing claims.

That distinction matters. It demonstrates how AI can be integrated responsibly into Earth Observation when governance, evaluation, and domain expertise are treated as central.

Across much of the commercial EO sector, conditions were different. AI adoption accelerated faster than the frameworks needed to govern its use. Speed, demonstrability, and time-to-market outweighed long-term validation. Foundation models proliferated, natural-language interfaces promised simplified access to geospatial data, and super-resolution approaches were promoted as delivering substantial apparent spatial gains.

In this environment, validation served to support product narratives rather than to challenge them. Evaluation focused on a narrow set of reassuring metrics, while questions of physical limits, robustness, uncertainty, and interoperability were deferred. Systems that produced outputs which looked plausible and could be demonstrated convincingly were often treated as sufficiently validated for use.

This dynamic was reinforced by a rapid influx of machine-learning practitioners into the field. Their contributions accelerated experimentation and development. At the same time, the domain-specific understanding required to interrogate inputs, recognise established patterns, and interpret outputs within physical constraints was not always equally prioritised. Attention concentrated on model performance and visual outputs, while data provenance, consistency, and continuity were postponed.

AI did not fail Earth Observation in 2025. It succeeded well enough, particularly in commercial settings, that scrutiny was treated as optional rather than essential.

This is where a different form of technical debt begins to accumulate, not in code, but in shared understanding, interpretability, and trust.

Better infrastructure, quieter progress

Some of the most consequential progress in 2025 occurred outside headline narratives of AI and defence.

The SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC) became an official OGC Community Standard. Zarr-based workflows matured. Cloud-native access grew faster and more interoperable. Time series access at scale improved dramatically. From a systems perspective, Earth Observation data became easier to discover, access, and process than at any point before.

These advances were incremental rather than spectacular. They did not produce the kinds of demos or major announcements that attract headlines, but they strengthened the foundations upon which both scientific continuity and commercial reliability depend.

Foundation models, and the return of old mistakes

By 2025, investment in large, generic foundation models for Earth Observation reached unprecedented levels. The question was no longer whether such models could be built, but whether their investment logic made sense outside a narrow set of institutional environments.

Training and maintaining these models requires sustained capital, repeated large-scale iteration, and continuous feedback loops. Even when labour costs are excluded, assuming PhD students or publicly funded researchers, the direct compute cost alone for models comparable in scale to recent flagship efforts can approach €1–2 million, largely in cloud credits. This does not account for downstream fine-tuning, evaluation cycles, or live deployment, nor for the associated energy use and carbon footprint. These costs are real, recurring, and unevenly distributed.

Outside organisations with stable public funding, long-term compute commitments, and mature evaluation pipelines, it is unclear who absorbs these costs, how failure is surfaced, or how iteration is prioritised. In practice, many actors can afford to train once, but far fewer can afford to revise, maintain, and meaningfully govern these models over time.

In this sense, foundation models risk repeating a familiar pattern in Earth Observation: the promise of a single, universal system capable of supporting a wide range of use cases, markets, and revenue streams. Historically, such “one platform that does everything” approaches have struggled. They centralise complexity, push evaluation downstream, and assume a level of user capacity that rarely exists in practice. The result is often a powerful core system that few users are equipped to interrogate, adapt, or meaningfully influence.

There is genuine value in foundation models. Their representation spaces are rich, and they capture complex spatial and temporal structure across large volumes of data. But representation alone does not justify investment. The critical question is whether downstream ecosystems are prepared to use these models responsibly, to evaluate performance against real operational decisions, to integrate feedback from failure cases, and to sustain iteration when models underperform in specific regions or conditions.

This readiness is uneven in structural, rather than technical, ways. In many organisations, benchmarks are still tied to pre-training objectives rather than decision outcomes, and processes for uncertainty characterisation, regional stress-testing, or post-deployment evaluation remain limited. There are teams that do invest in these practices, but they are the exception rather than the norm. As a result, model performance is often assessed using metrics that are convenient to compute and broadly reassuring, while value is claimed in downstream contexts such as risk assessment, monitoring, or planning, where those metrics are only weakly informative.

The focus on global scale reinforces this misalignment. Most Earth Observation users do not buy “global performance.” They pay for coverage, still priced per square kilometre in many cases, and they care about reliability in specific regions, for specific phenomena, under known conditions. Models optimised to maximise average global performance can appear strong overall while underperforming precisely where commercial or policy decisions are made.

In an industry that continues to monetise value primarily per km², scale can become a liability rather than an advantage. The cost of training and maintaining globally optimised models is absorbed upfront, while value is realised locally and unevenly. This creates a structural mismatch between investment logic and how Earth Observation products are priced, sold, and trusted.

Taken together, these dynamics suggest that foundation models are advancing faster than the institutional, economic, and governance structures required to support them responsibly.

Lower barriers, louder noise

AI-assisted development significantly lowered the barrier to producing tools across the Earth Observation ecosystem. This enabled experimentation, learning, and rapid prototyping, and in many cases accelerated individual understanding. It also changed what contribution looked like, and what gained visibility.

There is real value in combining existing tools, libraries, and services. Composition has always been part of effective software development in Earth Observation, and AI-assisted workflows have made it easier to explore ideas, test assumptions, and connect components that were previously difficult to integrate. In many cases, this has genuinely broadened participation and lowered entry costs.

The ease of producing convincing demos outpaced the mechanisms needed to assess durability, relevance, and long-term value. Many tools were built and shared primarily to showcase individual capability or technical fluency. They served their immediate purpose, but rarely moved beyond that stage into operational use.

This matters because Earth Observation depends on a relatively small set of foundational open-source libraries, standards, and data-access tools. These projects handle interoperability, numerical robustness, and long-term compatibility. They underpin both commercial platforms and institutional missions, including systems supported by billion-euro investments but maintained with minimal dedicated funding. When they work well, they tend to disappear into the background.

Lowering the barrier to assembling new workflows and demonstrations did not automatically strengthen this shared foundation on which the sector depends. In practice, it often increased dependence on it without increasing care for its maintenance. Contribution took the form of combining existing components rather than sustaining the libraries, formats, and interfaces that make such composition possible. Output increased, but the condition of the underlying infrastructure became harder to see.

As development practices evolve, the imbalance becomes harder to ignore. The industry is beginning to move away from informal, throwaway prototypes toward systems expected to run in production, interoperate reliably, and withstand audit and review over time. Open source plays a different role here. Specifications can define interfaces and expected behaviour, but they do not ensure numerical correctness, performance, or operational reliability. That work still resides in code, tests, documentation, and long-term stewardship.

The issue is not experimentation, nor the use of AI to accelerate development. It is the absence of conditions that reward maintenance, validation, and long-term ownership at the same pace that they reward visible output. As reliance on shared open-source infrastructure continues to grow, this imbalance accumulates a form of technical and organisational debt that is difficult to measure, but costly to ignore.

Climate stayed central, but not structurally

Climate signals continued to intensify. Data confirmed that 2024 crossed the 1.5 °C threshold, and January 2025 became the warmest January on record.

For an industry built to observe planetary change, these should have been defining reference points. Instead, they functioned as background context. They were noted, acknowledged, and then absorbed into a year dominated by geopolitics and AI.

Earth Observation is better equipped than ever to measure climate change. The tools are more capable, the data more accessible, and the analytical capacity more advanced than at any point before. Yet the alignment between measurement and response has weakened. Acting on climate signals competes with other priorities in a world shaped by geopolitical tension, economic uncertainty, and short-term risk management.

Climate response is not only a scientific challenge; it is also an economic one. In an environment where public budgets are under pressure and procurement favours immediate operational value, sustained investment in climate resilience and mitigation becomes harder to justify alongside other competing priorities.

Climate is central to Earth Observation in principle, but less often in how systems are structured, funded, and justified.

Where this leaves Earth Observation

By the end of 2025, Earth Observation was faster, more operational, and more confident in its capabilities. Budgets expanded. AI systems entered production. Standards stabilised. Constellations matured.

At the same time, the year narrowed what the sector is effectively organised around. Defence increasingly sets the pace. AI compresses complexity into outputs. Visibility is rewarded more readily than understanding. Climate urgency remains present, but no longer consistently shapes structure or strategy.

None of this means that Earth Observation has lost its relevance or potential. The opposite is true; the tools, platforms, and analytical frameworks are stronger than ever. What has become less certain is not capability, but intent; the purposes toward which these systems are directed, and the kinds of outcomes they are ultimately designed to serve.

Acceleration, on its own, is not direction. Neither is scale. Nor automation. Direction emerges from the choices embedded in funding models, evaluation practices, and the kinds of work that are rewarded and sustained over time.

Looking ahead, the question is not whether Earth Observation will continue to advance. It will. The more consequential question is whether the disciplines of stewardship, governance, and institutional memory will advance with it, or whether they will quietly erode.

2026 will not resolve that by default. But it will make the consequences of those choices more visible, and harder for the sector to ignore.

Alongside this article, I am publishing a NotebookLM containing all Spectral Reflectance newsletter issues from 2025. Throughout the year, the newsletter functioned as a running record of industry developments as they emerged, including launches, funding decisions, policy signals, and technical developments.

The notebook is not intended as a comprehensive account of everything that occurred across the sector, and some developments were inevitably missed. Rather, it reflects the material I drew on to form and test the arguments presented here. Readers can explore it directly, query it, and trace how specific observations relate to the broader themes discussed in this piece.

First image from Sentinel-6B extends sea-level legacy [link]
"Copernicus Sentinel-6B, launched last month, has reached its orbit and delivered its first set of data, which show variations in sea level in the North Atlantic Ocean. This data underlines how the mission will continue to strengthen the long-term reference record of sea levels, a key parameter of climate change."

Planet Reports Financial Results for Third Quarter of Fiscal Year 2026 [link]
Planet reported a record Q3 FY2026, with revenue reaching $81M (+33% YoY) and strong growth in RPOs ($672M) and backlog ($734M). The quarter was also marked by major defence wins, continued Pelican and SuperDove launches, and the acquisition of Bedrock Research to accelerate AI-driven global monitoring capabilities.

Other Planet News:

• Planet Releases First Light Image From Pelican-6 [link]

• Why Planet Labs (PL) Is Up 42.8% After Strong Q3 Results And Raised 2026 Revenue Outlook [link]

Finland’s ICEYE Closes €150 Million Series E Funding Round [link]
ICEYE has raised €150 million in Series E funding, led by General Catalyst, to expand its SAR constellation and accelerate Gen4 satellites with up to 16 cm resolution.

Kongsberg and Helsing to Develop Large Defence Satellite Constellation [link]
Helsing and Kongsberg have announced a German–Norwegian partnership to build a large LEO constellation for space-based intelligence, surveillance, and targeting, combining small satellites with AI-driven multi-sensor fusion. The project reflects Europe’s growing push for sovereign defence space capabilities, with initial deployments expected from 2028.

Kuva Space Links Up with WWF-Indonesia on Carbon Monitoring [link]
Indonesia will use satellite data and AI to monitor and quantify its blue carbon assets through a new partnership between Kuva Space and WWF-Indonesia. The collaboration will map mangrove and seagrass ecosystems using hyperspectral imagery, supporting scalable blue carbon accounting, conservation planning, and sustainable finance.

Umbra and Italy’s E-GEOS to Co-Develop Geospatial Intelligence Solutions [link]
Umbra and e-GEOS have signed a multi-year agreement to co-develop SAR-based geospatial intelligence solutions, combining COSMO-SkyMed data with Umbra’s commercial constellation.

Space Force Awards Muon Space $44.6M in SBIR Funding for 3-Satellite Mission [link]
The U.S. Space Force has awarded Muon Space $44.6M to deploy a three-satellite mission demonstrating a dual-use space-based environmental monitoring capability. The mission builds on Muon’s FireSat heritage, combining weather, cloud characterization, and wildfire monitoring with enhanced multispectral IR sensing and onboard processing.

SatVu releases first-of-its-kind thermal image revealing true operational activity inside major U.S. data centre [link]
SatVu has released a 3.5 m-resolution thermal image offering rare, near-real-time insight into operational activity inside a major U.S. data centre, revealing heat signatures from cooling, power, and high-load infrastructure. The release highlights how space-based thermal intelligence can bring independent transparency to the rapid expansion and energy footprint of global digital infrastructure.

Accelerating the Earth Index Flywheel with Support from the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation [link]
Earth Genome has secured a $600K grant from the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation to accelerate development of its Earth Index AI platform, supporting accountable supply chains, biodiversity monitoring, and sustainable food systems. The funding will drive new partnerships and technical enhancements aimed at delivering scalable, data-driven environmental impact.

OpenET Expands Satellite-based Water Use Data Across 48 States, Providing Critical Information to Farmers and Water Managers Across the Nation [link]
OpenET has expanded its free, satellite-based evapotranspiration data to cover all 48 contiguous U.S. states, providing farmers and water managers with high-resolution, daily and monthly insights to support more informed water management decisions.

EU Soil Monitoring Law Enters into Force [link]
The EU Soil Monitoring Law has entered into force, establishing a common framework to track and assess soil health across Europe amid growing evidence of widespread soil degradation. The law strengthens the role of data, remote sensing, and Copernicus indicators as foundations for protecting ecosystems, food security, and climate resilience.

ESA Phi-Lab UK funding awarded to address sustainable agriculture and space environmental challenges with AI [link]
ESA Phi-Lab UK has awarded ~£380k in seed funding to Deep Planet and Space DOTS, supporting AI-driven projects in soil carbon monitoring for sustainable agriculture and space environment intelligence as part of its first cohort.

Developer's Orbit

Wherobots introduces RasterFlow for scalable imagery preparation and inference [link]
Wherobots has launched RasterFlow, an on-demand workflow for preparing satellite imagery, running large-scale AI inference, and delivering analysis-ready outputs without users having to build custom infrastructure. In practice, it reduces the engineering effort needed to mosaic imagery, handle clouds, and operationalise geospatial models at scale, with results written directly to modern analytics-friendly data formats.

Wherobots is currently inviting users to request access via a private preview.

Rasterio 1.4.4 is out! [link]
Rasterio 1.4.4 introduces key maintenance upgrades, raising minimum requirements to Python 3.10+ and GDAL 3.6+, alongside enhanced reprojection controls and a broad set of bug.

Kudos to Sean Gillies and Alan D. Snow for their continued stewardship of one of the geospatial ecosystem’s core libraries.

STAC Browser v4.0.0 is out! [link]
STAC Browser v4.0.0 lands with a major upgrade, introducing an OpenLayers-based map engine, a refreshed UI, map-based collection search, and native GeoJSON visualisation.

Utilizing GDAL + STAC to Create Cloudless Sentinel-2 Composite [link]
Space4Good shared a walkthrough of building cloudless Sentinel-2 composites using STAC for data access and GDAL for processing, powered by the new GDAL 3.12 raster pipeline. The workflow combines mosaicking, reprojection, cloud masking, and median compositing into a fast, reproducible open-source pipeline, producing clean multispectral composites for downstream analysis.
Credit to Ramadhan for the work and results shared.

I/O-Maxing Tensors in the Cloud [link]
"Zarr Python (using either Icechunk or Obstore as the storage engine) is now able to fully saturate the network between EC2 and S3, resulting in the physically maximum possible throughput when reading and writing data. This holds true in the presence of compression and over a wide range of chunk sizes."

Introduction of tile-part Length (TLM) Markers in Sentinel-2 JPEG2000 Images [link]
ESA will introduce TLM markers in Sentinel-2 JPEG2000 files (planned for Q1 2026), which explicitly describe where each image tile is stored in the file. In practice, this makes it faster and more efficient to read small areas of interest without loading the full image.

Data

Open Tanager Data Release 2 is live [link]
Nearly 100 new hyperspectral scenes have been added to the Planet Open STAC Catalog, expanding global coverage with improved metadata and new fire and greenhouse gas examples, including methane.

Explore the data via Planet’s Open Catalog – Tanager Core Imagery.

Geoscience Australia’s Elevation and Depth Data [link]
"DCS Spatial Services has just published 97,085 km² of newly captured NSW elevation data to Geoscience Australia’s Elevation and Depth – Foundation Spatial Data (ELVIS) portal and it’s free to download." [link]

SoilSuite – Sentinel-2 – Africa, 4 year composite (2018-2021) [link]
"The SoilSuite contains a collection of different image data products that provide information about the spectral and statistical properties of soils and other bare surfaces of three East-African countries (Rwanda, Kenya and Ethiopia). It is created using DLR’s Soil Composite Mapping Processor (ScMAP), which utilises the Sentinel-2 data archive."

Global Water Risk from Aqueduct in Living Atlas [link]
Aqueduct 4.0 Global Water Risk data from WRI is now available in ArcGIS Living Atlas, bringing high-resolution, current and future water stress indicators into GIS workflows to support water management, policy, and climate resilience planning.

Snapshots

Earth from Space: Pariacaca Mountain Range, Peru [link]
"Following International Mountain Day, which creates awareness of the importance of mountain environments around the world, the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission takes us over the Pariacaca Mountain Range in Peru.

Also called the Huarochirí mountain range, the Pariacaca range is a significant part of the Peruvian central Andes, the Cordillera Central. Pariacaca is known for its beautiful and rugged peaks, many of them reaching over 5000 m in height."

Interesting read

Satellites help tackle landfill methane leaks [link]
"Satellites are emerging as a powerful new tool in the fight to curb emissions of methane. While methane is much shorter-lived in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, it is vastly more potent at trapping heat, which makes rapid cuts essential for slowing warming in the short term. The same satellite technology that has transformed methane monitoring in the oil and gas sector is now being turned towards another major source – landfill sites."

Seven things we learned from the UN World Urbanization Prospects [link]
“Urbanisation is reshaping the world at a pace which has surpassed earlier expectations, altering how people live and how societies plan for housing, transport, and essential services. A new analysis from the UN World Urbanization Prospects 2025, drawing on harmonised global settlement data from the Copernicus Emergency Management Service’s Global Human Settlement Layer datasets, reveals a series of shifts challenging long-standing assumptions. Tokyo is no longer the world’s largest city, the proportion of urban dwellers has been greatly underestimated, and five more unexpected findings reshape our understanding of where people live today.
This week’s Observer explores seven key insights from the report and what they mean for the planet’s urban future.”

Quantifying local climate regulation in three Estonian cities [link]
Estonia has completed its first national attempt to quantify how urban vegetation cools cities, focusing on Tallinn, Tartu, and Narva. Using Copernicus tree cover data, NASA land surface temperature, and evapotranspiration datasets, the study maps how green spaces reduce urban heat at both local and city-wide scales. The results reveal clear cooling hotspots in parks and urban forests and lay the groundwork for integrating ecosystem services directly into spatial planning and climate adaptation strategies.

Satellites Detect Seasonal Pulses in Earth’s Glaciers [link]
"Malaspina Glacier in southeastern Alaska is the planet’s largest piedmont glacier, with ice that spills from the Saint Elias Mountains’ higher elevations and spreads out like pancake batter onto the coastal plain. Though it might appear static, the glacier is “alive” with movement throughout the year, typically speeding up in spring and slowing to a crawl by winter. A new analysis by NASA scientists shows that glaciers around the world display all kinds of patterns in seasonal movement—some similar to Malaspina and some vastly different."

The Black Sea Kerch Strait’s maritime accident oil spill simulations in December 2024 [link]
"On 15 December 2024, the Volgoneft 212 tanker broke apart near the Kerch Strait during severe storm conditions, releasing approximately 4,000 tons of mazut. The extent of the spill was difficult to assess, as high waves limited the use of satellite SAR imagery.
To support the emergency response, researchers from Orion Research, MHI-RAS, Mare Investigatorium Studia, and Rowell Computing used the MEDSLIK oil spill model.
Their simulations reproduced the observed drift and coastal deposition of oil between Veselovka, Anapa and Utrish, as confirmed by RadarSat and European Space Agency - ESA SAR images.
This Use Case demonstrates how Copernicus Marine data can support a rapid, evidence-based response to marine pollution events, thereby improving preparedness and cooperation across the Black Sea region."

Land Use Changed the Climate. Now Climate’s Changing the Land [link]
"Land-use change has long been recognized as a major contributor to global warming. Deforestation and agriculture alone account for nearly 25% of human-caused greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

One might think this effect is uni-directional: Cutting down trees, plowing up grasslands and draining wetlands release GHGs that fuel climate change. But satellite monitoring shows that this relationship is a two-way street. Climate change itself is increasingly leading to the loss and degradation of forests, grasslands, wetlands, rivers and even farms, creating a dangerous feedback loop."

The Earth Observation Conundrum [link]
Earth Observation still struggles to scale; not for lack of demand, but due to a structural, system-level mismatch. The industry remains fragmented by modalities, poorly integrated across analytics and delivery, and locked into area-based pricing shaped by intrinsic EO cost mechanics rather than customer value. True adoption, this piece argues, will only come through systems thinking: tightly integrating multi-modal sensing, analytics, and workflow delivery into outcome-driven products.

Beyond the Hype: Element 84’s Pragmatic Vision for AI in Engineering [link]
Element 84 shares a practical take on using AI in engineering, focusing on clear value, human responsibility, and high-quality software. Rather than chasing hype, AI is positioned as a tool to support engineers while keeping security, maintainability, and client trust front and center.

Advancing Hyperspectral Data with the Third Atmospheric Correction Inter-Comparison eXercise (ACIX-III) [link]
ACIX-III has delivered a comprehensive benchmark of atmospheric correction algorithms for PRISMA and EnMAP hyperspectral missions, highlighting both strengths and persistent challenges across land and water surfaces. The results provide critical guidance for improving reflectance retrievals and supporting upcoming imaging spectroscopy missions such as CHIME and SBG.

Climate

A Subtle Return of La Niña [link]
La Niña returned to the equatorial Pacific in September 2025 and has persisted into December, though this event remains relatively weak and its broader climate impacts are still uncertain. Strengthened trade winds have cooled the central and eastern Pacific, a signal observed in sea surface height data from the Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite, where cooler, denser water leads to lower sea levels. These oceanic changes influence the exchange of heat and moisture with the atmosphere, with potential effects on global circulation patterns. However, as NOAA and NASA scientists note, weak La Niña events are often difficult to predict and do not always produce typical regional weather outcomes.

Competitions

EOPF Zarr Community Notebook Competition [link]
"Your challenge is to write a educational Jupyter Notebook showcasing what is possible with Sentinel-1, 2 or 3 data in the new Zarr format. All are welcome!"

Submission Deadline: 30 Jan 2026, 23:59 (UTC+1)

TerraMind Blue-Sky Challenge [link]
"A bi-monthly award spotlighting the boldest, most imaginative ways to push TerraMind beyond “just another fine-tune”. Whether you’re prototyping a new multi-modal workflow, exploring Thinking-in-Modalities, or inventing a never-seen geospatial application, we want you to share it with everyone."

DualityAI<>LunateAI - Geospatial Object Detection [link]
"Train a model to detect buildings in aerial satellite or drone geospatial images of a rural environment."
Deadline: Jan 12, 2026

Learning

Copernicus Sentinel-1D and Sentinel-5A provide first images, marking important advances in earth and atmospheric monitoring [link]
"Following their successful launches in 2025, two new Copernicus satellite missions, Sentinel-1D and Sentinel-5A, have returned their first images, representing important progress in the EU’s capacity to monitor the planet’s surface and atmosphere."

Related:
Sentinel-1D delivers first images: from Antarctica to Bremen [link]
Sentinel-5 debuts images of atmospheric gases [link]

Level-2 News

ESA Member States commit to largest contributions at Ministerial [link]
Europe has just made its largest-ever commitment to space, with €22.3 billion approved at ESA’s Ministerial Council in Bremen. Member States reinforced Europe’s autonomy and leadership across science, Earth observation, navigation, telecommunications, security, and exploration under ESA’s Strategy 2040. This historic investment strengthens Europe’s resilience from space, advances next-generation Copernicus, and accelerates missions from climate monitoring to planetary defence. At 50 years on, ESA enters its next era with unprecedented political trust, ambition, and scale.

Related:

ESA Keeps the Door Open for More Defense Funding [link]
“ESA plans to keep subscriptions for a new defense initiative open for the next year, instead of following the typical process of finalizing funding at the close of each three-year ministerial meeting.

ESA’s new, record-breaking budget of €22.3B for the next three years includes funding for its proposed European Resilience from Space (ERS) program—a military-grade system of systems, providing surveillance, communications, navigation, and EO capabilities.

The proposal secured €1.2B of the €1.35B sought. The agency now wants to raise at least a further €250M from European defense ministries.”

Sentinel-2 Nighttime Imaging Campaign [link]
"Sentinel-2A is conducting a special acquisition campaign to collect a set of Level-1B nighttime images during the ascending part of its orbit.

The campaign begun on 3 December 2025 and is designed to cover areas of interest related to gas flares, bright lights, wildfires, and fishing/marine activities. This exceptional activity will span one full Sentinel-2A cycle and will target only selected locations. Level-1B data will be acquired in either MSI (Multi-Spectral Instrument) VIC (Vicarious) mode or RAW mode.

ESA’s HydroGNSS mission launched to ‘scout’ for water [link]
"The European Space Agency’s first Scout mission, HydroGNSS, was on 28 November, marking a significant step in advancing global understanding of water availability and the effects of climate change on Earth’s water cycle.

The two twin HydroGNSS satellites were carried into orbit at 19:44 CET aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, as part of the Transporter-15 rideshare flight from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California."

Transporter-15 Brings 140 Payloads to Orbit [link]
"While SpaceX rideshare missions are always chock-full of new tech headed to orbit, Friday’s Transporter-15 flight was busier than most. The launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California deployed 140 payloads, which is the second-largest haul since regular Transporter flights began in 2021.
Transporter-15 carried dozens of EO sats intended to kickstart constellations—or build upon tech that’s already in orbit."

Onboard Transporter-15:

• High-resolution radar satellites launched for Greece [link]

• Italian mission adds to growing IRIDE space fleet [link]

• Terramind.tiny flying onboard Planetek Italia's AI-eXpress Plus satellite [link]

ST Engineering to Build SAR Satellite for UAE Program [link]
"Emirati defense and tech company Edge Group has selected ST Engineering to build a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite for the UAE’s national SAR constellation program, Sirb."

BlackSky Releases First Images from New Gen-3 Satellite After Undisclosed Launch [link]
"BlackSky Technology released images from a recently launched Gen-3 satellite, reporting that it delivered images from the satellite less than 24 hours after launch."

A first for Europe as Infinite Orbits and SES will provide geostationary satellite life extension mission [link]
"Following an in-orbit demonstration, Infinite Orbits will extend the lifespan of at least one of SES’s GEO satellites by five years, with further missions under consideration in the years ahead. This will make Infinite Orbits the first European company to carry out such a mission, and only the second in the world. This collaboration with the world’s biggest GEO satellite operator, Infinite Orbits further strengthens its position as a key partner for GEO in-orbit services."

Enabled Intelligence Bags $708M NGA Contract [link]
"AI startup Enabled Intelligence won an IDIQ contract from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) worth up to $708.3M to support data labeling activities across the US government. "

ESA and Norway explore possibility of Arctic Space Centre [link]
"The European Space Agency has signed a letter of intent with Norway to advance the prospect of a new ESA Arctic Space Centre to be hosted in Tromsø."

Redwire lands $44 million DARPA award to build air-breathing satellite [link]
"Redwire secured a $44 million contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to finish building a satellite designed to operate in very low Earth orbit. The award expands a 2024 agreement in which DARPA tapped the Florida company for its Otter Very Low Earth Orbit mission, an effort to field an air breathing spacecraft that can function in an extremely thin but still resistant atmosphere."

SRON provides new CAMS Service targeting methane emissions at facility level [link]
"The Sentinel satellites, including the TROPOMI instrument, form the backbone of Europe’s Copernicus Earth Observation programme. For the methane emission monitoring within the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS), this data is now complemented by a number of Copernicus Contributing Missions (CCMs) that provide additional information and higher resolution. ESRON will use CCMs to pinpoint individual methane sources all around the world, such as large gas leaks, to provide insights on emissions and initiate mitigation efforts. "

Developer's Orbit

STAC Expands Its Reach [link]
"October 2025 marked two big moments for the SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC) community: its recognition as an Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Community Standard and a community sprint focused on representing multidimensional data with Zarr. Together, they show how STAC is growing into a flexible framework for a wider range of geospatial data.

If you’re working with cloud-native geospatial data, this post explains why this matters."

The Next Phase of Aurora: Open and Collaborative AI for Weather and Climate Forecasting [link]
Microsoft is doubling down on Aurora, its open-source AI model for weather and climate forecasting. Trained on massive atmospheric datasets, Aurora is already showing promise in predicting weather, hurricanes, air quality, and ocean dynamics. By keeping the platform open and expanding research partnerships, Microsoft aims to empower scientists and national meteorological services worldwide to deliver more accurate, locally tailored forecasts where they matter most.

TerraTorch and Iterate have been migrated to a dedicated GitHub organization, TerraStackAI, which will also aggregate other GeoAI projects [link]

STAC Browser v4.0.0-rc.2 is out [link]
"Alongside numerous bug fixes and smaller improvements, this release introduces a long-awaited feature: a new grid system for the card layout.

The first release candidate also delivered several major enhancements, including improved mapping capabilities through OpenLayers, a refreshed header design, and more." [link]

IBM and ESA open-source AI models trained on a new dataset for analyzing extreme floods and wildfires [link]
"IBM and ESA fine-tuned its multi-modal TerraMind models on a first-of-its kind dataset designed to improve how we prepare and respond to natural disasters."

ImpactMesh [link]
"ImpactMesh is a large-scale multimodal, multitemporal dataset for flood and wildfire mapping, released by IBM, DLR, and the ESA Φ-lab. It integrates Sentinel-1 SAR, Sentinel-2 optical, Copernicus DEM, and high-quality annotations from Copernicus EMS. The technical report is released soon."

WeatherNext 2: Our most advanced weather forecasting model [link]
"Google DeepMind and Google Research are introducing WeatherNext 2, their most advanced and efficient forecasting model. WeatherNext 2 can generate forecasts 8x faster and with resolution up to 1-hour. This breakthrough is enabled by a new model that can provide hundreds of possible scenarios.

WeatherNext 2’s forecast data is now available in Earth Engine and BigQuery. They’re also launching an early access program on Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform for custom model inference."

Snapshots

Earth from Space: Eye of the Sahara [link]
"This giant feature looks out from a sea of golden sand in the Adrar Region of northern Mauritania. Once thought to be the site of a meteor impact, the Richat Structure is now believed to have been caused by a process of uplift of a large dome of molten rock that, once at the surface, was shaped by wind, sand and water erosion. Geologists agree that the structure is at least 100 million years old.

The layered formation consists of a series of concentric rings and resembles a bull’s eye from space, so is also known as the eye of the Sahara or the eye of Africa."

Interesting read

EarthCARE lifts the clouds on climate models [link]
"True to its promise, the European Space Agency’s EarthCARE satellite is now being used to calculate directly how clouds and aerosols influence Earth’s energy balance – the all-important balance that regulates our climate. In doing so, EarthCARE is poised to sharpen the accuracy of climate models, the very tools that guide global climate policy and action."

Related:
Exploring EarthCARE Data and Analysis Tools [link]
"To fully exploit the wealth of EarthCARE data, ESA and its partners have developed a comprehensive suite of data access, visualisation, analysis, and simulation tools. These tools not only support scientific discovery and validation, but also ensure that the mission’s data are readily usable by the broader research community.

From visualisation (Timeline Viewer, Imagery Portal), to analysis (MAAP, DIVA, ectools, earthcarekit), to simulation (ATLID, MSI and CPR simulators), the toolchain supports the full EarthCARE lifecycle from quicklooks to algorithm development and validation.

ESA provides two online platforms on which several tools are hosted. The platforms are EarthCARE MAAP (Multi-mission Algorithm and Analysis Platform) and DIVA (Demonstration of an Integrated approach for the Validation and exploitation of Atmospheric missions)."

LinkedIn Highlights

What makes TiTiler so valuable [link]

ESA’s InCubed is strengthening Europe’s global leadership in Earth Observation
[link]
Europe’s EO sector is thriving at €2.66B in revenue, but growth depends on turning innovation into customers. ESA’s InCubed is doing exactly that: unlocking over €350M in private funding, accelerating scale-up, and strengthening Europe’s global leadership in Earth Observation.

Sentinel-6B launched to extend record of sea-level rise [link]
"The Copernicus Sentinel-6B satellite is now circling Earth, ready to continue a decades-long mission to track the height of the planet’s seas – a key measure of climate change.

Like its predecessor, Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich, Sentinel-6B carries the latest radar altimetry technology to further extend the sea-surface height record that began in the early 1990s. These measurements help scientists understand sea-level rise – crucial information for shaping climate policy and protecting the millions of people living in coastal areas around the world."

Canada announces massive jump in funding to European Space Agency [link]
"Canada, seeking tighter ties with the European Union, will boost its investment in European Space Agency programs by C$528.5 million ($377.96 million), a tenfold increase compared to previous contributions, a top cabinet member said on Tuesday.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who won an April election on the back of a promise to diversify the economy in the face of U.S. tariffs, is pressing for tighter defense and security relations with the EU."

Satellogic Reports Third Quarter Financial Results [link]
Satellogic reported strong momentum in Q3 2025, with revenue rising 29% to $3.6M while operating costs fell 18%. The company also strengthened its balance sheet through a $90M public offering and announced a seven-figure strategic data distribution deal with Suhora covering India and Nepal. In parallel, Satellogic unveiled its new 30 cm-class NextGen satellite platform with onboard AI processing.

ESA Business Incubation Centres: Celebrating 2000 Start-ups Empowered Across Europe [link]
"The European Space Agency proudly celebrates a major milestone in its mission to nurture innovation and entrepreneurship as over 2000 European start-ups have now been successfully incubated through the ESA Business Incubation Centres (BICs) network. With 37 centres across 23 countries, the ESA BICs form Europe’s largest ecosystem dedicated to supporting space-related ventures."

GHGSat Orders 2 Satellites from SFL Missions for Methane-Monitoring Constellation [link]
"Montreal-based GHGSat has ordered two additional satellites from SFL Missions for its greenhouse gas monitoring constellation. The two companies have been longtime partners, with SFL Missions building 11 satellites for GHGSat over the past decade.

These satellites will be GHGSat-C18 and -C19. They will be built on SFL’s high-performance 15 kg NEMO satellite platform. GHGSat ordered two satellites from SFL last year as well."

Earth Fire Alliance and OroraTech Partner to Expand Global Access to Space-Based Wildfire Intelligence [link]
"Earth Fire Alliance (EFA) and OroraTech announced a new partnership aimed at transforming access to wildfire data for responders worldwide.

By combining data and efforts, EFA and OroraTech will empower agencies across the globe with real-time wildfire detection, monitoring, and mitigation insights. This partnership advances the organizations’ common missions by launching initial services as soon as possible with a focus on non-governmental organization (NGO)-led fire management efforts in regions such as Kruger National Park in South Africa and conservation areas across the African continent."

Redwire Wins $44M DARPA Contract for VLEO Demo [link]
"Redwire Corporation ($RDW) landed a $44M Phase 2 contract from DARPA, which tasks Redwire to manufacture and deliver a VLEO satellite with air breathing electric propulsion (ABEP) technology.

The contract is part of DARPA’s Otter program, which aims to validate the tech in VLEO through a flight lasting more than a year at an orbital altitude between 90 and 250 km."

Carbon Mapper has helped the state of California mitigate methane emissions events [link]
"The California Air Resources Board shared that the Tanager-1 satellite and data from Carbon Mapper has helped the state identify and mitigate 10 large methane emissions events at oil and gas facilities since May."

Developer’s Orbit

Coherent Change Detection on phidown 0.1.22 [link]
This tutorial uses a pair of Sentinel-1 SLC images over the area affected by the Port of Beirut explosion on August 4, 2020, at 5:00 p.m. CEST, to demonstrate coherence-based change detection for mapping surface changes.

• Colab Notebook [link]

• phidown Notebook [link]

Integration of AIS data into phidown [link]
"This notebook walks through pulling Sentinel-1 SAR scenes and matching AIS reports for the same area and time window."

GDAL 3.12.0 “Chicoutimi” is released [link]
"It is a large user-facing release that continues the remaking of the GDAL command line. Follow this link or a full listing of features, bug fixes, and changes."

TerraTorch team celebrated its 1000 issues/pull requests anniversary [link]
TerraTorch reaching 1000 issues and pull requests indicates steady project maturity and active community engagement.

TerraTorch is a PyTorch domain library based on PyTorch Lightning and the TorchGeo domain library for geospatial data. [link]

Data

Wyvern’s open data program is now browsable via map [link]
Wyvern launched their Open Data Program back in February 2025 and has been updating a open knowledge centre for working with Wyvern hyperspectral imagery. [link]

Making their catalog browsable via map is a nice touch!

Datasets added to the gee-community-catalog [link]

• Copernicus EMC-BUILT Global Built-up Surface R2025A

• OpenBuildingMap Global Building Footprints with Semantic Information

• Global Renewables Watch Temporal Dataset of Solar and Wind Energy

• Biodiversity Intactness Index (BII) for sub-Saharan Africa

Related:
EMC-BUILT R2025A – Exposure Mapping Component built-up surface grid, derived from Sentinel-2 year 2022 [link]

GFM now includes data from Sentinel-1C [link]
The Global Flood Monitoring (GFM) product of the Copernicus Emergency Management Service (CEMS) is now including data from Sentinel1C.

Snapshots

Iraq Reservoirs Plunge to Low Levels [link]
"Satellite observations of Lake Tharthar show that the reservoir’s water levels have swung sharply during the past three decades.

The lake, Iraq’s largest, lies within a broad natural depression between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, although its water comes only from the Tigris. During periods of excess flow, water managers divert floodwater from the river at the Samarra barrage via a canal and into the reservoir. These inflows usually cause water levels to spike in the spring, when snowmelt in the headwaters of the Tigris in Türkiye and Iran joins with runoff from seasonal rains.

However, a lack of snow and rain, along with upstream diversions, have starved the reservoir of inflow in recent years, preventing water levels from rising in 2021, 2022, and 2023. Despite a slight improvement in 2024, plunging water levels have accompanied the multi-year drought."

Interesting reads

The Cloud Native Geospatial Conference — Now in One NotebookLM [link]
A NotebookLM resource covering the Cloud Native Geospatial (CNG) conference
After the ~60 talks from the Cloud Native Geospatial (CNG) conference in Utah were released, Simon Ilyushchenko, Google Earth Engine Data Ingestion Lead, used Gemini Deep Research to synthesise them into a cohesive narrative summary. He then spent significant time refining and editing the output into a high-quality NotebookLM resource, now accompanied by a podcast version. A great way to catch up on the full conference in one structured pass.

Cloud Native Geospatial 2025: Systems, Lakehouse, and Generative AI [link]

Global Nature Watch Turns Data into Environmental Intelligence [link]
Global Nature Watch is a new AI-powered, open monitoring platform that turns more than 80 peer-reviewed environmental datasets into accessible planetary intelligence. Built with Land & Carbon Lab, it lets anyone ask plain-language questions about forests, grasslands, wetlands, agriculture, and carbon — and get authoritative maps and insights in seconds. Powered by GeoAgents and cloud-native geospatial infrastructure, it bridges rigorous science with real-world decision-making for communities, policymakers, and businesses worldwide.

Common Practices for Quantifying Methane Emissions from Plumes Detected by Remote Sensing [link]
This document establishes community-accepted best practices for quantifying methane emissions from spectroscopic remote sensing of individual plumes. Developed by domain experts, it promotes consistency in how methane estimates are generated, validated, reported, and quality-controlled across different sensors and methodologies. Aimed at both data producers and users, it provides essential guidance for ensuring that emission products are reliable, transparent, and fit for purpose.

Climate

A Free Slide Deck on Climate Change [link]
"Climate Central created Climate Change: Key Facts, a free slide deck available in English and Spanish, using their library of Climate Matters content — all of which is reviewed by staff scientists in line with our high standards for accuracy and clarity.

The 72-slide presentation features Climate Central’s clear and compelling graphics. Speaker notes on each slide explain the science and include links to learn more and customize the presentation with local graphics for 240+ U.S. cities."

ESA investigates high-stakes Amazon tipping point [link]
"For decades, the Amazon rainforest has quietly absorbed vast quantities of human-generated carbon dioxide, helping to slow the pace of climate change. Recent evidence, however, suggests that this vital natural buffer may be weakening – though uncertainties remain.

To help close this critical knowledge gap, European and Brazilian researchers have gathered deep in the Amazon to carry out an ambitious European Space Agency-funded field campaign."

Podcasts

Join Matt Forrest, Chris, and Isaac as they cut through the noise of geospatial AI to explore whether foundation models are truly ready for deployment, or if the field is still navigating a “wild wild west” of unproven tools and hype.
This discussion challenges the industry’s obsession with foundation models, arguing that “scale is a trap” and that solving fundamental data infrastructure bottlenecks often creates more value than complex deep learning.
Ultimately, the conversation suggests that the best way to cut through the noise is to simply “go touch some data” and focus on solving specific, real-world problems with grounded methods.

LinkedIn Highlights

QGIS vs. ArcGIS in Google Trends [link]
A quick look at QGIS vs. ArcGIS popularity using Google Trends, via Matt Forest.

“A super cool use case for Skysat videos from orbit: Measuring river flow rates from space” [link]

Maps, Models and Systems in Spatial Understanding [link]
Building on Fei-Fei Li’s “Spatial Intelligence,” Aravind frames geospatial understanding in three layers: maps, models, and systems. While EO has mastered maps and is moving into models, true value is shifting toward systems that drive decisions.

Call For Papers

Call for Papers: ITU Kaleidoscope 2026 [link]
"Kaleidoscope 2026, hosted by the AI for Good Global Summit 2026, invites multidisciplinary, original research proposals that explore how frontier technologies, including artificial intelligence, brain–computer interface, embodied AI, autonomous driving, geospatial and quantum information technologies interface with telecommunications."
Submission of full paper proposals: 15 December 2025

Learning

Can we generate a credible SAR image from an optical image? [link]
Elise Colin dives into the physics, philosophy, and hard limits of SAR simulation, unpacking what generative models can (and can’t) truly reproduce. If you work with radar, generative AI, or remote sensing realism, this is a must-read.

But this time, the image never touches a ground station.

Instead, it veers sideways, into a shoebox-sized rack of GPUs bolted to the inside of another satellite. Within seconds, an onboard model flags a new ignition, cross-checks with wind and fuel maps, and beams down a handful of bytes: coordinates, confidence, predicted spread.

On the fire command center’s screen, the alert looks almost trivial; just one more icon on a map.

Behind it, though, is the question more people in cloud and space are beginning to ask out loud:

Are we really going to build data centers in space?

And if we do… is that an act of climate responsibility, or simply a very expensive way of exporting our problems above the Kármán line?

Earth Observation isn’t the sole force pushing compute off-planet, but it may be the first domain where the case becomes impossible to ignore: too much data, too little bandwidth, too slow a path from pixel to decision. This essay argues that EO is uniquely positioned to become the first scalable proving ground for orbital compute: its bottlenecks are structural, its latency demands are high, and no other domain benefits as much from processing data close to the sensor.

The rest of this essay is about why this “radical” idea is on the table at all, what it could unlock for Earth Observation, and what’s standing squarely in the way.

Why we’re even entertaining such a wild idea

Terrestrial data centers already consume a noticeable slice of global electricity. By 2030, US data centers alone could consume around 9% of the country’s electricity. This rising consumption, fueled by AI training and inference, creates a genuine energy policy problem. What used to be “big IT loads” are now grid-scale industrial assets. The same machines that generate photorealistic cats and power large language models are now competing with homes, factories, and public transit for electricity.

This might sound familiar to anyone tracking the sector. Utilities cannot bring multi-hundred-megawatt capacity online fast enough. Some operators — like Microsoft — have been reported to stockpile GPUs that sit idle simply because they lack the power or the “warm shells” to plug them in. Others quietly wheel in temporary gas generators just to get clusters running because the grid cannot yet carry the load.

Cooling multiplies the issue. Hyperscale facilities consume millions of litres of water a day to keep their processors within comfortable temperatures. In regions already struggling with drought, this is not just unpopular, it is politically explosive. Add in the reality that many of these sites sit on precious land near metropolitan areas, and you start to see why permits are slowing, communities are pushing back, and expansion plans look increasingly like a geopolitical game of Tetris.

Meanwhile, the orbital segment faces its own growing constraints. High-resolution optical constellations, SAR fleets, hyperspectral demonstrators, thermal missions, GNSS reflectometry, atmospheric sounders; they are producing exponentially more data than the Radio Frequency (RF) downlink infrastructure was ever designed to support.

The sensors are scaling exponentially; the downlink is scaling linearly. Petabytes of data are being produced every day and ground stations strain to keep up. Latency from acquisition to usable product stretches into hours and, for some use cases, days. For climate and disaster risk, that lag is not an inconvenience; it’s a failure of design.

Put simply: on Earth, we are running out of room, power, and political patience for more data centers. In space, we are running out of time and bandwidth to move and process the data we already collect.

And somewhere between an overburdened grid below and an overburdened downlink above, one group of people began sketching another option:

What if we just put the data center in orbit?
What if compute lived closer to the sensors, and closer to the only power source that scales indefinitely: sunlight?

The Orbital Solution: A New Geography for the Cloud

Reframing space as an industrial environment rather than a distant frontier makes orbital data centers feel less like science fiction and more like a deliberate reallocation of infrastructure.

The physical argument begins with sunlight. On Earth, solar panels contend with atmosphere, clouds, weather, and the simple fact of night. Their capacity factor, the ratio between what they could produce in theory and what they actually produce over time, hovers around a few tens of percent. But in carefully chosen sun-synchronous orbits, panels can achieve capacity factors exceeding 90%, with stable irradiance and minimal intermittency. A satellite can surf the terminator and remain in near-constant daylight.

It is no surprise that some of the most visible proponents of this vision are the people staring at the scaling curves of AI. Jeff Bezos has spoken openly about gigawatt-scale data centers in space within a few decades. Tom Mueller, who helped architect the early SpaceX engines, has argued that if we want the benefits of compute without burning the planet in the process, a meaningful fraction of heavy compute will eventually need to move off-world.

For most domains, that still feels like a leap. For Earth Observation, which already lives half in orbit and half on the ground, the leap is smaller. We already fly constellations, already generate petabytes overhead, and already treat orbit as part of the data pipeline. Giving these sensors access to compute in orbit becomes less a revolution than an overdue symmetry: sensing up there, thinking up there.

A Revolution in Earth Observation: From Bent Pipe to the In-Orbit Compute Fabric

Earth Observation is already indispensable for managing climate risk, food security, and disaster response. Yet the architecture we still rely on to turn satellite data into decisions is, in many ways, fundamentally 20th-century.

For decades, EO has followed a bent-pipe model: satellites acquire data, store it, and then offload everything to ground stations whenever they pass overhead. From there, the data is transferred into data centers or cloud regions, indexed, calibrated, processed, analysed, and eventually turned into maps, alerts, or time series. At a moderate scale, this works. At the scale of modern and planned constellations, it starts to crack.

Meanwhile, the terrestrial ground station infrastructure, which serves as the traditional backbone for satellite operations, faces immense strain as the volume of space-generated data explodes. These stations are indispensable; without them, a satellite cannot update software, receive commands, or shed the terabytes it accumulates each day. Agencies like the USGS, NASA, and NOAA rely on strategic polar stations, such as Norway’s SvalSat, as these are the only spots where satellites in polar orbits can downlink their data and receive commands on every trip around Earth. However, this dependence has created a critical bottleneck: there are only so many passes per day, only so much RF spectrum to go around, and only so much contact time available for a fleet that is expanding far faster than the ground segment built to serve it. With the number of satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) expected to increase by 190% within the next decade, the RF Ground Station infrastructure is predicted to be strained, affecting data quality and reducing the available bandwidth time for each satellite. This reliance also introduces geopolitical and physical vulnerabilities, as demonstrated by events like cable breaks, which can cause delays of several hours for critical datasets, directly affecting applications like weather forecast and civil protection.

To address this reliance and ground station bottleneck, Orbital Edge Computing (OEC) proposes a different flow, shifting the paradigm from the “bent-pipe” model that has defined EO for half a century. Instead of relying on the ground as the first place where data becomes information, OEC pushes part of the processing pipeline back into space. High-throughput radio and optical links, such as Optical Intersatellite Links (OISLs), ferry raw sensor data sideways; from imagers to orbital compute nodes. There, AI models segment, classify, detect anomalies, estimate physical variables, and decide what is worth keeping. The result is not a continuous flood of scenes to Earth, but a curated stream of maps, alerts, and derived products that are far more actionable and far less burdensome to downlink.

The difference for EO missions is more than marginal. Fires can be detected and confirmed in near-real-time, with predicted spread calculated before the first downlink pass even becomes available. Flooded areas can be mapped from SAR data and compared with building footprints while the orbit is still overhead. Cloud-covered scenes can be discarded on-orbit instead of clogging the ground segment with useless scenes. Crop stress indices can be derived while the constellation is still over the fields, and only the derived products ever leave space. In a fire control center, a civil protection room, or an agricultural advisory service, the user sees the same thing — a dot on a map, a polygon, a time series — but behind it the distance between sensing and decision is shorter and far more efficient.

Crucially, once satellites and orbital data centers can talk to each other, they can also begin to task each other. The jargon for this is “tip-and-cue.” A thermal satellite detecting a suspicious hotspot can tip a higher-resolution optical satellite to capture a follow-up pass. A SAR constellation can cue a high-resolution optical satellite when it sees structural change in a wetland or a suspect vessel in a shipping lane. In a mature orbital compute layer, those tips and cues need not wait for a human operator; they become machine-to-machine negotiations, executed at orbital timescales and governed by policy, priority, and mission logic rather than human reaction speed.

Seen from that angle, orbital data centers are not just remote cloud regions in exotic locations. They are where the EO system begins to behave like a distributed orbital compute layer: sensing locally, integrating globally, and acting — by retasking sensors, escalating alerts, or thinning data streams — without waiting for the ground infrastructure to dictate the tempo of the observation cycle.

The First Wave of Orbital Compute Infrastructure

The early market has arrived: funding rounds, demonstrator missions, feasibility studies, and national strategies are already in motion.

In China, ADA Space is pursuing the most aggressively scaled vision to date. Its Three Body Computing Constellation launched its first 12 satellites in May 2025, each equipped with 100 Gb/s optical links and on-orbit accelerators delivering up to 744 trillion operations per second (TOPS). This “first wave” is designed as the seed of a far larger architecture: a 2,800-satellite distributed supercomputer in LEO. For China, this is more than technical ambition. It is a bid to own a strategic high ground where AI, sensing, and communications converge; a national asset as much as a commercial platform.

In the United States, private enterprise and Big Tech are pursuing parallel “moonshot” approaches. Among the commercial leaders is the US startup Starcloud (formerly Lumen Orbit), which treats space not as a novelty but as the only environment capable of sustaining AI’s power appetite. In November 2025, Starcloud launched Starcloud-1, carrying an NVIDIA H100; a chip nearly two orders of magnitude more powerful than anything previously flown. The mission tests wildfire detection, crop monitoring, and vessel identification models running in orbit. But Starcloud’s long-term vision is even more ambitious: a five-gigawatt orbital hypercluster powered by a solar array four square kilometers across, with second-generation satellites carrying Blackwell-class chips expected as early as 2026.

Axiom Space is taking a different route. Rather than standalone compute nodes, it is integrating orbital data center capability directly into Axiom Station, the commercial successor to the ISS. Axiom has flown both an AWS Snowcone and its AxDCU-1 prototype, and plans to field its first operational ODC nodes in 2025. Partnerships with Red Hat and Kepler suggest a focus on national security workloads, autonomous in-orbit R&D, and a steadily expanding commercial edge computing ecosystem.

The cloud hyperscalers are also entering the field. Google’s Project Suncatcher positions orbit as a “research moonshot” to stretch the scaling laws of machine learning beyond the limits of terrestrial energy and cooling. Instead of NVIDIA hardware, Google intends to fly its own Trillium-generation TPUs, with two prototypes scheduled for launch by 2027 in partnership with Planet.

Across the Atlantic, Europe is framing the challenge through policy; one of sovereignty and climate alignment. The ASCEND feasibility study, led by Thales Alenia Space, argues that orbital compute can support Europe’s net-zero ambitions while strengthening digital independence. The roadmap moves from a 50-kilowatt demonstrator around 2031 to a one-gigawatt facility by mid-century, with strong emphasis on lifecycle emissions, regulatory guardrails, and European control of data processed overhead.

Despite their different ambitions, all of these programs intersect with Earth Observation, which makes EO the most immediate proving ground for in-orbit compute. Whether the driver is national security, AI scaling, or digital sovereignty, EO workloads are the first to benefit from moving processing closer to the source.

Yet turning these ambitions into infrastructure requires more than technical daring. It requires confronting the physical and regulatory realities that no strategy document can gloss over. Markets may be signaling demand, governments may see sovereignty and security advantages, and companies may race to stake orbital territory, but none of that suspends the constraints of heat, radiation, mass, and maintainability. Before orbital compute can mature from a geopolitical aspiration into a reliable layer of critical infrastructure, it must first pass through the hard bottlenecks that space itself imposes.

The Hard Challenges: When Physics Pushes Back

If the story ended there, this essay would be a press release. In reality, orbital data centers collide head-on with constraints defined entirely by physics.

The first is thermal management. Space is indeed cold, but it is also a vacuum. On Earth, data centers lean heavily on convection; fans, chilled water, and heat exchangers move energy away from hot components. In orbit there is no air and no water, only radiation. The Stefan–Boltzmann law sets the fundamental limit on how much heat a surface can radiate at a given temperature and emissivity. To dissipate megawatts of heat without running your radiators at dangerously high temperatures, you need radiating surfaces measured in the thousands of square metres, and you need structure, coolant loops, deployment mechanisms, and careful pointing controls to make them work. The result is that the mass of the cooling system can easily equal or exceed the mass of the compute it is cooling.

Power density suffers as a result. On the ground, with immersion and advanced liquid cooling, designers are pushing 30-100 kilowatts per rack and dreaming of more. In orbit, realistic studies suggest that 10-20 kilowatts per rack will be closer to the practical ceiling. Every extra GPU in a thermal design comes with a penalty in area and mass.

The second hard constraint is radiation. Outside the atmosphere and magnetosphere, electronics are exposed to galactic cosmic rays, solar particle events, and the radiation spikes associated with the South Atlantic Anomaly. These cause long-term radiation damage, measured as total ionizing dose, and also trigger unpredictable single-event effects; bit flips in memory, latch-ups in logic, occasional fatal damage to components. Experiments on the International Space Station and other missions have shown unexpectedly high failure rates among commercial solid-state drives flown with minimal protection. Even purpose-designed chips, like newer AI accelerators, have shown surprising vulnerabilities in their high-bandwidth memory subsystems under test.

Mitigating these effects is possible but never free. Shielding adds mass. Redundancy multiplies cost and increases system complexity. Radiation-hardened parts are often generations behind their terrestrial cousins in performance and can be an order of magnitude more expensive.

Storage is where these constraints intersect most sharply. Spinning disks are too fragile and too heavy to fly. Solid-state drives are more robust mechanically, but their dense flash cells and controllers present large targets for radiation. Aggressive error correction, scrubbing, and replication can mask many faults, but the underlying physics does not go away.

Finally, there is the simple fact of distance. Once a data center is in orbit, you cannot send a technician with a flashlight and a spare drive at three in the morning. Everything — hardware, software, and operations — has to be designed from the start for fault tolerance, autonomous recovery, modular replacement, and eventually, robotic servicing. And everything that is not deorbited responsibly becomes part of a growing cloud of debris that threatens the very constellations that orbital compute is meant to serve.

These are not abstract worries; they define the physical boundaries of what can be built. Within those boundaries, though, there is still room for careful engineering and meaningful progress.

The Easier Challenges and the Emerging Enablers

Not all obstacles are laws of nature. Some are matters of engineering maturity and here the picture is more optimistic.

Virtualization is a good example. On Earth, we treat hypervisors and virtual machines as tools for flexibility and utilization. In orbit, they become tools for survival. By inserting a hypervisor such as Xen between the hardware and the operating systems, engineers can carve the processor into strongly isolated domains. Flight software and platform control sit in one or more real-time VMs, pinned to dedicated cores with strict guarantees. EO workloads — fire detection, ship tracking, change detection, even tenant-specific models — run in other VMs that can be restarted, throttled, or migrated without endangering the satellite’s basic functions.

Experiments on representative multi-core SoCs have shown that this kind of configuration can deliver both low-latency, low-jitter behavior for critical tasks and robust containment of badly behaved or heavily loaded workloads. In practical terms, that means:

A runaway ML experiment cannot starve the altitude control loop. A third-party EO tenant cannot crash the mission by accident. A container processing flood extents cannot quietly monopolise resources needed for station-keeping. The result is an orbital compute node that behaves less like a monolithic system where everything shares the same failure points and more like a small in-orbit cluster, where mixed-criticality workloads run side by side without the risk of failing together.

Communications technology is following a similar arc. Optical inter-satellite links, once exotic, are becoming standard in large constellations. For EO and orbital compute, they form the high-bandwidth backbone of the system. They allow imaging satellites to dump data to compute nodes that are not directly overhead a ground station. They allow those nodes to share intermediate products and models among themselves. They carry tip-and-cue messages — machine-to-machine tasking instructions — connecting sensors and compute into a dynamic, reconfigurable sensor-web.

Launch costs and on-orbit servicing sit in a fuzzier but encouraging category. Reusable rockets have already driven the price per kilogram to orbit down dramatically compared to the shuttle era. Fully reusable systems, if they reach operational maturity, may push costs below the critical thresholds where a 10-year total cost of ownership for orbital compute starts to compete with the energy and infrastructure cost of high-end terrestrial facilities. Robotic servicers are being tested that can refuel, reposition, and eventually repair or upgrade satellites. Taken together, these developments do not make orbital data centers cheap, but they make them less absurd.

None of this removes the underlying physical limits. It simply reframes the problem: from “infeasible” to “viable for certain workloads”, provided the design respects those constraints.

Uncertainties in the High Ground: Law, Governance, and Control

Even if engineers manage to solve or at least squeeze these technical problems, there is still the quieter question of how an orbital cloud fits into our legal and political frameworks.

Space law as it stands was not written with data centers in mind. States remain responsible for objects they launch or authorise. Liability for damage is written into treaties. But where does data jurisdiction live when the processors are in orbit? If an EO company based in one country processes imagery of critical infrastructure from another country on a platform built and launched by a third, whose laws apply — and who has the right to inspect, regulate, or restrict it? If tip-and-cue chains autonomously retask satellites over a sensitive region, who is accountable for the action: the operator, the algorithm, the state that licensed the platform, or the tenant whose model initiated the cue?

Regulators are only beginning to grapple with terrestrial questions of data residency and sovereignty. Adding an orbital layer will not simplify that. For EO, which already sits in the sensitive space between transparency and surveillance, the arrival of orbital compute and autonomous machine-to-machine tasking will sharpen old tensions and create new ones.

Environmental governance is another open front. If lifecycle emissions from launch and re-entry turn out to be significant contributors to warming or ozone depletion, it is hard to imagine that large orbital compute constellations will escape scrutiny. One can easily foresee permitting regimes that require full lifecycle climate accounting, mitigation plans, or even offsets for launch and re-entry footprints; mirroring, at altitude, the environmental reviews that already shape terrestrial infrastructure projects.

And then there is debris. Large, long-lived structures are not trivial additions to crowded orbital shells. If multiple states and corporations deploy competing orbital compute hubs without robust end-of-life plans, the probability of collisions and cascading fragmentation grows. For EO, which depends on the long-term stability of low-Earth orbit, this isn’t a distant or theoretical issue but a hard operational constraint on the entire sector.

How This Future Could Look — If We Get It (Mostly) Right

Return, finally, to that fire in the Mediterranean and roll the clock forward to a plausible late-2050s.

Launch costs have fallen into the tens of dollars per kilogram. Fully reusable rockets fly often enough that adding orbital infrastructure is no longer an extraordinary undertaking but simply another predictable operational expense. On-orbit servicing has matured to the point where satellites can be refuelled, nudged into new orbits, and have modular compute “bricks” swapped out robotically. Debris rules are enforced; operators who fail to comply lose access to launch services, insurance, or the radio spectrum needed to run their satellites.

Above us, in a handful of carefully managed orbital shells, sit clusters of orbital EO compute hubs. They are not absurd mega-rings, but more modest stations: trusses, solar arrays, large radiator panels, instrument modules, and both pressurised and unpressurised racks. Each hub carries a layered stack of workloads with different criticalities. Some cores run radiation-hardened (rad-hard) control loops; others host higher-performance accelerators that are expected to live a few years before being swapped. Hypervisors carve the hardware into slices. Spacecraft control lives in one set of virtual machines, infrastructure for communications in another, high-priority EO applications in a third, and time-boxed experiment slots in a fourth.

Around these hubs, constellations of EO satellites orbit in different planes and inclinations. Optical imagers, SAR platforms, thermal sensors, GNSS reflectometry missions, atmospheric sounders, and niche scientific instruments each play their part. Some feed data directly to Earth. Many send their raw output sideways to the hubs, where it is combined with data from other sensors, from reanalysis products, from climate models, and from historical archives cached in-orbit.

Tip-and-cue has become routine. A SAR satellite noticing unusual activity in a coastal zone cues a very-high-resolution optical satellite to take a closer look on its next pass. A thermal mission detecting unusual urban hotspots at night nudges a hyperspectral sensor to sample the area for signs of industrial flaring or leaks. A flood detection model running on a hub identifies a rapidly expanding inundation area and pushes updated tasking patterns to upstream imagers to maximise coverage over the next few orbits. Much of this negotiation happens machine-to-machine, mediated by policies set on the ground but executed at orbital speed.

On Earth, the interfaces look almost disappointingly simple. Fire agencies subscribe to ignition alerts for predefined areas of interest rather than to “all imagery over this region.” River basin managers subscribe to floodplain exceedances and soil moisture anomalies instead of raw scenes. Agricultural advisory services receive updated, field-scale crop stress maps driven by models that were partially computed on-orbit and partially refined on the ground. National climate centers pull continuous, quality-controlled EO-derived indicators without seeing the terabytes of data from which they were derived.

None of this makes terrestrial data centers obsolete. Heavy model training, long-term archival, open data services, exploratory science, offline reanalysis; all of that still happens in large facilities firmly bolted to the crust. The hybrid model emerges naturally: orbit for proximity to sensors and to sunlight; Earth for depth, breadth, and the messy business of humans interrogating data.

In that world, the question is no longer whether we should put data centers in space in some abstract sense, but rather which computations genuinely belong there. The answer will not be “everything” and it will certainly not be “nothing.” It will be a moving boundary, shaped by launch costs, by policy, by climate accounting, and by the unforgiving algebra of power, bandwidth, and latency.

What seems clear already is that EO will be one of the first domains to cross that boundary in a meaningful way. The mismatch between how quickly we can see the planet change and how slowly we can respond is not going away on its own. Orbital compute, paired with autonomous tip-and-cue, strong virtualization, and honest environmental accounting, offers one of the few credible paths to closing that gap.

Used well, it can help transform an overloaded EO ecosystem into an orbital fabric that observes, interprets, and responds on operational timelines.

Used badly, it will become just another shiny, expensive distraction orbiting above a planet that never managed to align its infrastructure with its ecological and physical limits.

Ultimately, technology alone will not decide which of those futures we get. The choices we make now — about where computation happens, how we account for its costs, and which problems deserve to be addressed in orbit — will.

Further Reading & Sources

In researching this piece, I worked through several papers, feasibility studies, mission docs, technical reports, and public statements. I used NotebookLM to organise, query, and cross-reference my sources. You can explore the notebook here.

Ariane 6 launches Sentinel-1D [link]
"The Copernicus Sentinel-1D satellite has joined the Sentinel-1 mission in orbit. Launch took place on 4 November 2025 at 22:02 CET (18:02 local time) on board an Ariane 6 launcher from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana."

ESA’s HydroGNSS Scout satellites ready for launch [link]
"After arriving at the California launch site at the end of September, the two HydroGNSS satellites have been carefully prepared for liftoff, scheduled this month.

HydroGNSS – a twin-satellite mission – marks the European Space Agency’s first ‘Scout’ venture. By harnessing signals from navigation satellites, HydroGNSS will help scientists gain new insights into key climate variables linked to water."

Rheinmetall and ICEYE establish joint venture in Neuss [link]
"The technology group Rheinmetall and ICEYE, have completed the establishment of their joint venture, Rheinmetall ICEYE Space Solutions GmbH, based in Neuss, Germany. As the majority shareholder, Rheinmetall AG holds 60 per cent of the shares in the joint venture, while ICEYE Oy holds 40 per cent."

Space4Good to expand rainforest protection with new funding [link]
"Space4Good has successfully closed a funding round led by Arches Capital, with participation from Empower Impact and Indigo Ventures!
Specifically, funding will enable Space4Good to:

• Further scale FORESTER in tropical regions across Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa, bringing trusted forest insights to teams on the ground.

• Have product learnings across varying customers, leading to ever ever-improving product suite.

• Grow Space4Good’s team and operations to meet growing international demand for verifiable environmental data.

Weekend SpaceX Bandwagon Mission Launches 18 Payloads to Mid-Inclination Orbit [link]
SpaceX’s Bandwagon-4 rideshare mission carried 18 payloads to mid-inclination orbit. The launch included several Earth Observation missions. Among them, three ICEYE-built SAR satellites for Space42, a LEMUR-2 satellite from Spire Global, and two weather-monitoring satellites from Tomorrow.io.

Rocket Lab launches “The Nation God Navigates” to join SAR constellation for Japan [link]
"“The Nation God Navigates” launched from Rocket Lab Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand at 19:51 UTC on November 5, 2025, deploying QPS-SAR-14, nicknamed YACHIHOKO-I for the Japanese god of nation-building, to a 575km circular Earth orbit.
This satellite joins the rest of the QPS-SAR constellation in providing high resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images and Earth monitoring services globally. iQPS aims to build a constellation of 36 SAR satellites that will provide near-real-time images of Earth every 10 minutes."

Developer's Orbit

Introducing OlmoEarth Platform: Powerful open infrastructure for planetary insights [link]
AI2 has released the OlmoEarth Platform, an open system that helps turn satellite, radar, and elevation data into up-to-date environmental insights. It’s built on the OlmoEarth foundation model, trained on millions of Earth observations and easy to adapt for tasks like crop mapping, wildfire risk, or deforestation monitoring. The platform includes open code, APIs, and tools such as OlmoEarth Studio and Viewer for building and sharing custom Earth observation models.

Related:

• OlmoEarth: A new state-of-the-art Earth observation foundation model family [link]

• GitHub: olmoearth_pretrain - Earth system foundation model data, training, and eval [link]

• OlmoEarth models on HuggingFace [link]

• Technical report [link]

Introducing wkls: A Python Library for Instantly Accessing Global Administrative Boundaries [link]
"Wherobots introduced Well Known Locations (wkls), a Python library for instantly accessing global administrative boundaries.
If you’ve ever spent hours searching for shapefiles, hardcoding coordinates, or maintaining boilerplate code just to define a city or country boundary, this one’s for you.
With wkls (”Whickles”), you can access more than 625K global administrative boundaries from countries to cities in a single, clean, chainable Python syntax."

Releasing lonboard 0.13! [link]
"Lonboard is a Python library for fast, interactive geospatial vector data visualization in Jupyter.
What’s new in Lonboard version 0.13:

• New layer types: H3, S2, Geohash, A5 and fixed HeatmapLayer

• Interleaved rendering with Maplibre: render data layers beneath Maplibre text labels

• Map UI elements (”controls”): scale, fullscreen, navigation

• Significant performance improvements: fixing earlier regressions"

A new release for PROPAGATOR: advancing wildfire modeling [link]
The CIMA Research Foundation announced that a new release of PROPAGATOR, wildfire spread simulation model, is now available as an open-source project on GitHub.

• GitHub: https://github.com/CIMAFoundation/propagator_sim

• Docs: https://cimafoundation.github.io/propagator_sim/0.0.2/

• Paper: PROPAGATOR: An Operational Cellular-Automata Based Wildfire Simulator [link]

Data

Φ-lab Interactive AIS Map [link]
“This data access provides globally collected Automatic Identification System (AIS) data, structured and organized on a daily basis for consistent access and analysis. Lightweight utilities to fetch and normalize AIS (Automatic Identification System) data from the AIS Hub webservice.”

From Legacy CSVs to Cloud-Native Geodata [link]
"Development Seed rebuilt Canada’s Spatial Access Measures dataset to show what happens when public data meets modern tools. By converting the legacy CSVs to GeoParquet and running them through DuckDB-WASM and deck.gl, they created an interactive map that works entirely in the browser. It’s fast, lightweight, and ready to explore."

Demo: https://developmentseed.org/spatial-access-measures/
GitHub: https://github.com/developmentseed/spatial-access-measures/

Snapshots

Earth from Space: Branco River, Brazil [link]
"As 30th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP30) takes place in Belém, Brazil, from 10-21 November, this image shows the Branco River and its surrounding forests in the Brazilian state of Roraima. It was captured by IRIDE’s Hawk for Earth Observation (HEO) constellation, launched earlier this year."

Interesting reads

Queryable Earth [link]
Element84 released Queryable Earth, a demo that showcases natural-language search across satellite imagery. Built on top of vision-language foundation models (VLMs) and LLMs, the system translates text queries, like “Find wetlands near Cape Cod”, into vector embeddings and matches them against pre-indexed satellite imagery of Massachusetts.

This approach is powered by models such as SkyCLIP and RemoteCLIP, which align satellite imagery and natural language in a shared embedding space. Instead of training models for specific object detection tasks, these VLMs understand what the image depicts in broader, semantic terms, making it possible to query imagery at scale through plain language.

Exploring a space-based, scalable AI infrastructure system design [link]
Google announced Project Suncatcher, an ambitious initiative to build solar-powered AI data centers in space. The project envisions constellations of satellites equipped with Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) and free-space optical links to run machine learning directly in orbit, leveraging solar energy. Prototype satellites, developed in partnership with Planet, are scheduled for launch in 2027.

Related:

• Preprint Paper: Towards a future space-based, highly scalable AI infrastructure system design [link]

• Planet to Build and Operate Advanced Space Platform for Google’s Project Suncatcher Moonshot [link]

A Parallel Effort:
Startup Starcloud has launched Starcloud-1 on November 2 aboard SpaceX’s Bandwagon-4 rideshare mission, to demonstrate orbital GPU compute using NVIDIA H100 hardware ; a parallel effort to Google’s Project Suncatcher, both advancing the vision of space-based AI infrastructure powered by solar energy and satellite-to-satellite links.

Related:
How Starcloud Is Bringing Data Centers to Outer Space [link]
Powerful NVIDIA chip launching to orbit next month to pave way for space-based data centers [link]

Cameras, GIS, and Why Tools Don’t Make You Special Anymore [link]
Follow this post by Daniel O’Donohue, where he reflects on the future of geospatial experts in an era when the bar to access and use geospatial tools keeps getting lower.

Programmer installed and ran Doom on an orbiting European Space Agency satellite [link]
"There were lots of interesting topics discussed in the recent Ubuntu Summit, but one in particular might just tickle the fancy of most any techie above 30: the story of how Doom was actually running in space. Programmer Ólafur Waage recounted the tale of when his team took part in the European Space Agency’s hacking challenge and got the seminal game running on a satellite."

Beyond the Echo - How satellites steer the radar beam [link]
ICEYE explains how satellites use hybrid (mechanical/electronic) steering to capture multiple radar images in a single pass, making it possible to follow features like rivers, roads, or other curved paths with high precision..

LinkedIn Highlights

When satellites miss what communities see [link]
Follow this LinkedIn post by Tobias Baumann, where he breaks down new research in Scientific Reports by Iheaturu et al. (University of Bern). The study reveals a striking “scale mismatch” between what satellites report and what communities experience.

Interpreting Embedding Dimensions by Samuel Barrett [link]

Upcoming Events

Training course: Numerical methods for weather prediction [link]
"This course describes contemporary methods, recent advancements, and current challenges in numerical techniques used across a broad range of weather prediction models for solving the governing equations of atmospheric dynamics on High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems. The methods covered are relevant to short and medium-range forecasting, seasonal prediction, climate modelling, and both global and limited area simulations."

ECMWF | Reading | 13-17 April 2026
Applications for this course close on 30 November 2025

Opportunities

• Water Resources Specialist at FAO [link]

• Manufacturing Deployment & AIT Manager at ICEYE (Greece) [link]

• Satellite Production Intern at ICEYE (Finland) [link]

• Geospatial Image Analyst at ICEYE [link]

• Senior Product Manager, Monitoring Imagery at Planet (US) [link]

• Digital Health and Geospatial health Consultant Roster at UNICEF [link]

• PhD Opportunity at University of Cambridge: AI for Geohazard Early Detection [link]

• Multiple Postdoctoral Fellowships at The Department of Land Surveying and Geo-Informatics at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University [link]

ESA invites young researchers in ESA Member States to submit scientific proposals to the Living Planet Fellowship Call 2025. The LPF aims at supporting the new generation of scientists in ESA Member States to undertake cutting-edge research in Earth Observation and Earth System and Climate Science that may maximise the scientific impact of ESA missions and European EO capacity and respond to the main challenges of the new ESA Earth Observation Science Strategy: Earth Science in Action for Tomorrow’s World.

Submission deadline – 14th November 2025

Level-2 News

Sentinel-1D encapsulated inside Ariane 6 fairing [link]
"The Copernicus Sentinel-1D satellite has been encapsulated inside the Ariane 6 fairing at Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana.

Encapsulation is when the satellite is placed inside the protective ‘nose cone’ of the rocket, known as the fairing. It is the final view of the satellite before launch, which is scheduled for Tuesday, 4 November at 22:03 CET."

Watch live: Sentinel-1D launch on Ariane 6 [link]
"The Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission is about to get its fourth satellite, with Sentinel-1D now ready for liftoff. Launch will take place with an Ariane 6 rocket from Kourou, French Guiana and live coverage will be shown on Tuesday, 4 November, at 22:02 CET (18:02 at Kourou)."

N° 64 - 2025: Decisions and announcements following 337th ESA Council [link]
The 337th ESA Council meeting brought a series of decisions shaping Europe’s space and Earth observation agenda. Cyprus is set to become an Associate Member of ESA, marking another expansion of the European space ecosystem. ESA also strengthened its global partnerships, while approving the next phase of the Destination Earth (DestinE) digital twin initiative. Significant progress was also made on the Atlantic Constellation, enhancing Europe’s ability to monitor climate change from space.

Key Highlights

• Cyprus to join ESA as Associate Member, pending ratification.

• ESA x WFP MoU (5 years): Accelerating the use of space data for food security and emergency relief worldwide.

• DestinE moves to Phase III: Targeting a high-accuracy digital twin of Earth by 2030; Phase III begins mid-2026.

• Support to Spain expanded: ESA to assist with launch and early operations of Spain’s first Atlantic Constellation satellite (part of a 16-sat EO constellation with Portugal).

• ESA x NASA cooperation on Vigil: NASA to contribute the JEDI instrument for improved solar activity monitoring from L5.

• Ministerial Council preparations underway — final decisions expected in Bremen on 26–27 November, with an extraordinary Council on 7 November.

Airbus, Thales, and Leonardo Agree to Create European Space Behemoth [link]
"European aerospace giants Airbus, Leonardo, and Thales have signed a memorandum of understanding to combine their respective space businesses into a single new company. Ownership will be shared among the three parent firms, with Leonardo and Thales each holding a 32.5% stake, and Airbus holding the majority stake of 35%. The new company, which will employ approximately 25,000 people, will be managed jointly under a “balanced governance structure.”"

Arianespace Pushes First Ariane 64 Flight Back to 2026 [link]
"Arianespace has confirmed that the first flight of the more powerful, four-booster variant of the Ariane 6 rocket will not be launched until 2026."

ABB Wins Canadian Space Agency Environmental Monitoring Contract [link]
"ABB, a Swedish tech company, has won a contract from the Canadian Space Agency to carry out the conceptual development (Phase A) of the Thin Ice Clouds and Far InfraRed Emissions (TICFIRE) instrument. It will be a component of the High-altitude Aerosols, Water Vapor and Clouds (HAWC) satellite mission – a Canadian-led initiative focused on advancing climate science and environmental monitoring. ABB announced the contract win, Oct. 23."

Iceye Strengthens Position in Central Europe with New Slovakian Partner [link]
"Iceye is strengthening its position in central and Eastern Europe. It is forming a strategic partnership with EMIS, a provider of geospatial information systems in Slovakia, to expand access to critical, near real-time hazard information for Slovak authorities. The two companies announced the partnership, Oct. 23."

Developer's Orbit

Google Earth AI - Geospatial Reasoning: New updates and more access to Google Earth AI [link]
"With Geospatial Reasoning you can use Gemini-powered agents to access these models for rapid analysis and insight, helping your organization make decisions at AI speed and scale. In this video, we ask the agent to predict when Hurricane Helena will make landfall, using Google’s Cyclone prediction model. This video is of a demonstration application built with the Geospatial Reasoning framework and has been edited for brevity.

To learn more, visit ai.google/earth-ai."

Related:
Technical Blog: Google Earth AI: Unlocking geospatial insights with foundation models and cross-modal reasoning [link]
Technical Paper: Earth AI: Unlocking Geospatial Insights with Foundation Models and Cross-Modal Reasoning [link]

Detecting War Crimes from Space - Building an Open-Source Pipeline with SQLMesh and DuckDB [link]
"If you’re getting the feeling recently that there’s more war in the world, you’re right. Compared to 2010 the number of armed conflicts have more than doubled. Centre for Information Resilience (CIR) aims to provide digital witness accounts using open source data and tools.
This blogpost by Tom Uijtdehaag is a technical deep dive into how they built an open-source pipeline to detect burn events in a collaborative effort between CIR and BigData Republic (BDR)."

GitHub Repository [link]

STAC is an official OGC community standard!
The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) announced the publication of the SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC) Community Standards.

Read the full announcement [link]

Data

NASA’s Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 (HLS) Data Now Available on Microsoft’s Planetary Computer [link]
"NASA’s vast archive of Earth observation data has long been a cornerstone for scientific discovery, environmental monitoring, and global sustainability efforts. Now, Microsoft has made it even easier for researchers, developers, and decision-makers to access and utilize this critical resource. Through a collaboration with NASA, the Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 (HLS) dataset is now available on Microsoft Azure by using Microsoft’s Planetary Computer platform."

VIIRS Global Burned Area Product Added to FIRMS [link]
"The global burned area product from Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) aboard the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (Suomi NPP) satellite has been added to the Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS). This NASA standard science product (VNP64A1) provides continuity to the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS)-generated NASA standard science burned area product (MCD64A1) and uses an adaptation of the same algorithm used to generate MCD64A1 Collection 6.1."

World Bank Global Administrative Divisions [link]
"A new, high-resolution global dataset of administrative boundaries—covering countries (ADM0), states or provinces (ADM1), and districts (ADM2)"

Related:
Mapping progress: How the World Bank is improving access to global administrative boundaries [link]

Snapshots

Hurricane Melissa barrels through the Caribbean [link]
"Classified as a Category 5 storm by the US-based National Hurricane Center, Hurricane Melissa is the world’s strongest storm so far this year.

The brightness temperature of the clouds at the top of the storm, high above the ocean, range from about –75°C near the eye of the storm to about –25°C at the edges. The temperature of the surrounding ocean is much warmer, reaching as high as 25°C. This image has been overlaid with the landmasses below."

Peering into the eye of Hurricane Melissa [link]
Sentinel-2C satellite captured Hurricane Melissa just as the hurricane was making landfall.

Interesting reads

Sentinel-4 offers first glimpses of air pollutants [link]
"The new Copernicus Sentinel-4 mission has delivered its first images, highlighting concentrations of atmospheric nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide and ozone. Despite being preliminary, these images mark a major milestone in Europe’s ability to monitor air quality all the way from geostationary orbit, 36 000 kilometres above Earth."

With the launch of Sentinel-6B, Europe builds on its ocean monitoring legacy [link]
"As November approaches, the EU Space Programme is preparing for its next milestone in Earth Observation (EO): the launch of Copernicus Sentinel-6B, the second of two identical satellites in Europe’s sea-level monitoring mission. Set to launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, the satellite carries a sophisticated radar altimetry instrument capable of measuring sea-surface height with centimetre precision, providing essential data for understanding climate change and protecting coastal communities worldwide. This Observer post looks at how the Copernicus Sentinel-6 satellite mission continues a thirty-year record of ocean altimetry with the launch of Sentinel-6B, ensuring continuity and precision in what has been an active year of satellite deployments for the EU Space Programme."

Air Quality Challenges in 2025: Europe’s Summer of Smoke, Dust and Ozone [link]
"The summer of 2025 significantly affected Europe’s atmosphere. From record-breaking wildfires in southern and western Europe, to intense Saharan dust intrusions and repeated peaks in surface ozone during prolonged heatwaves, air quality was negatively impacted by multiple events. Data from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) show how these overlapping events combined to create serious risks for human health and the environment across the continent."

Common Practices for Quantifying Methane Emissions from Plumes Detected by Remote Sensing [link]
"CEOS & CGMS are shared the publication of the “Common Practices for Quantifying Methane Emissions from Plumes Detected by Remote Sensing”

Developed through collaboration across the international community, this document outlines recommended practices for generating, validating, and reporting methane emission estimates from detected plumes. It aims to improve transparency, consistency, and interoperability across datasets and missions."

Warmer oceans mean fewer reflective clouds [link]
"A case study by EUMETSAT’s Dr Rob Roebeling and his team demonstrate how satellite data can be used confirm the effects of warmer oceans on marine stratocumulus clouds and explore what this means for our future climate."

Satellites watch as record-breaking ocean waves carry a storm’s power across the sea [link]
"Satellite data from the SWOT mission reveals how massive waves act as storm “messengers,” carrying a storm’s power across entire oceans."

Upcoming Events

AI Meets EO Education: Smarter Content for Smarter Learning [link]
"Artificial intelligence is reshaping the way we design and deliver training. Across the Earth observation (EO) and geospatial community, educators are beginning to use AI tools to generate learning materials, create localized examples, and produce interactive content that connects more effectively with learners around the world.

This interactive webinar will explore how AI can empower EO trainers by making their daily work easier, faster, and more effective. Participants will see real-world demonstrations of AI-assisted tools, including ESA’s EVE, and learn how emerging virtual assistants are being developed to make complex data more accessible to learners everywhere."

12 November 2025 | 13:00–14:30 UTC | Online

Opportunities

• Visiting Researchers in onboard AI for Φ-sat-2 mission [link]

Learning

Why a SAR image is not your usual optical one [link]
Follow this post by Elise Colin to explore the key differences between Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and optical imagery.

Common Space is working toward a new kind of satellite mission - one driven by impact, not profit. Their goal is to deliver open, high-resolution imagery where it’s needed most: to support communities, journalists, educators, and human rights advocates tackling crises on the ground.

They're designing this mission around societal impact, and they want your input on what that should look like.
Share your thoughts here: Fill out the survey

Read more about the initiative here: https://www.commonspace.world/

Level-2 News

METimage delivers spectacular first images [link]
"EUMETSAT has released the first Earth images from its METimage instrument on board the recently launched Metop Second Generation A1 (Metop-SGA1) satellite, with these early teasers showcasing the exquisite detail, true-to-life colour, and data products that will ultimately support national weather services in improving forecasts that save lives, protect communities and benefit economies."

Planet Awarded Luno B Contract by National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) for AI-Enabled Solutions [link]
"Planet announced its subsidiary Planet Labs Federal has been awarded a contract by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) under the Luno B indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contract.

Planet Labs Federal today announced it has been awarded a $12.8M contract by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) under the Luno B indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contract.

The $12.8 million initial award is for Advanced Analytics for Maritime Operations and Reconnaissance (AAMOR). Under this award, Planet will provide the NGA with AI-enabled Maritime Domain Awareness solutions, which include vessel detections and monitoring over key areas of interest in Asia-Pacific. The contract, which was won with Planet partner SynMax, integrates Planet’s daily, global PlanetScope data and SynMax’s Theia product analytics – providing AI-enabled detections of maritime events at strategic and tactical levels."

The Netherlands Commits to “Maintain” ESA Contribution Levels Through 2028 [link]
"The Dutch government has decided to contribute €344.3 million to the European Space Agency (ESA) over the next three years. The government also announced that, with the addition of its national space programmes, the country would spend a total of €550 million from 2026 to 2028.

The most significant contributions to ESA programmes, apart from its mandatory Science Programme contribution, will be €40 to 50 million for ESA Earth Observation programmes, €40 to 45 million for ESA’s launcher programmes, and €25 to 30 million for ESA Technology programmes."

Rocket Lab launches Synspective’s “Owl New World” mission with improved SAR capabilities [link]
"The “Owl New World” mission launched on Electron from Rocket Lab Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand at 16:33 UTC on October 14 to deploy the seventh StriX satellite to a 583km low Earth orbit.
The mission was the first of a series of 21 dedicated Electron launches to take place between now and the end of the decade for Synspective, a Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellite data and analytics company from Japan."

Planet Unveils Next-Gen Owl Satellites With 1 Meter Resolution, Nvidia GPUs [link]
"Planet unveiled its next-generation “Owl” satellites, which are designed to provide near-daily monitoring in 1-meter resolution, with more advanced onboard processing capabilities. The Owl fleet will provide continuity with the existing SuperDove fleet that underpins the company’s core, PlanetScope Monitoring product."

Related:
Introducing Owl: Planet’s Most Advanced Satellite Mission Yet [link]

IHI Orders Satellites from Iceye in Deal to Assemble Satellites in Japan [link]
"Japanese aerospace and defense company IHI Corporation has signed a procurement contract with Iceye to build four satellites and up to 20 additional satellites in a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) constellation."

Space42 Completes First UAE-Integrated SAR Satellites in Iceye Partnership [link]
"Space42 has shipped three synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites — its first satellites to go through assembly, integration, and testing (AIT) within the United Arab Emirates under a partnership with Iceye."

Defense Continues to Propel Earth Observation Market, With Opportunties in AI and Golden Dome [link]
Defense continues to propel the Earth Observation market, representing nearly 50% of overall EO activity and driving a 42% growth in the defense data and value-added services sector, now worth $2.5 billion.
Industry leaders at World Space Business Week highlighted a growing demand for sovereign geospatial autonomy as nations seek independent capabilities for security and intelligence.
At the same time, opportunities are emerging in the U.S. Golden Dome project and through the convergence of AI and EO, enabling faster, more automated insights from space.

Developer's Orbit

Zarr Everywhere [link]
Zarr is a cloud-native open standard for chunked array data, widely used in Earth science and beyond to make massive datasets easier to store, share, and analyze in distributed environments.
Development Seed continues to push the boundaries of cloud-native geospatial data with the Zarr community. Read about their latest work on Virtual Zarr and Zarr v3 adoption.

tifviewer - A simple GeoTIFF viewer for the command line [link]
Keiko Nomura developed this lightweight GeoTIFF viewer that runs directly from the command line, called viewtif.
Users can visualise single-band GeoTIFFs, RGB composites, and shapefile overlays in a simple Qt-based window.

GitHub: https://github.com/nkeikon/tifviewer

Related:
Interactively explore raster and vector datasets using CLI tools powered by Leafmap, MapLibre, and LocalTileserver [link]

TerraTorch v1.1 is released [link]
"TerraTorch is a toolkit for Geospatial Foundation Models (GFMs) — built for fine-tuning and inference at scale. The new release brings improvements in usability, new models support, and better inference options."

Work in progress: ECMWF data stores turn ARCO [link]
ECMWF has introduced a new Analysis-Ready Cloud-Optimised (ARCO) Data Lake, extending its Data Store services for CAMS and C3S. Built on Zarr and the ECMWF Common Cloud Infrastructure, ARCO enables faster, more efficient access to multi-dimensional datasets like ERA5 and ERA5-Land.

Related:
ARCO Data Lake coming soon for the Data Stores Services [link]

S2-RUT-L1C - Stand alone tool computing Sentinel2-MSI L1C uncertainties [link]
"ESA announced the public release of an upgraded version of the Sentinel-2 L1C Radiometric Uncertainty Tool (S2-L1C-RUT).

This tool enables users to generate pixel-level maps of expected radiometric uncertainty for any Sentinel-2 spectral band.
The uncertainty estimates are built on established metrology standards and have been validated using flight data from the 2024 Sentinel-2A / Sentinel-2C tandem acquisitions campaign.

The tool is open source, Python-based, and freely available for download, together with full documentation, at: https://gitlab.acri-cwa.fr/opt-mpc/s2_tools/s2rut"

phidown [v0.1.20] Sentinel-1 Burst Search [link]
"You can now search and retrieve individual Sentinel-1 SLC bursts directly. Perfect for InSAR time series, burst-level analysis, or regional monitoring."

Check out the new notebook example.

Data

Digital Earth Australia (DEA) Tidal Composites [link]
"Digital Earth Australia (DEA) Tidal Composites are cloud-free imagery mosaics of Australia’s coasts, estuaries and reefs at low and high tide. Calculated using a geometric median of Sentinel-2 imagery from the highest and lowest 15% of observed tides, DEA Tidal Composites deliver an annually updated snapshot of high and low tide Australian coastal environments."

Release of Version 2.0.0 of the Global land surface meteorological observations dataset (1755–present) from comprehensive in situ observations [link]
"ECMWF announced the release of Version 2.0.0 of the Global land surface meteorological observations dataset (1755–present) from comprehensive in situ observations, now available in the C3S Climate Data Store (CDS).

What’s new in this version?

• Up-to-date coverage: Now includes data through 2024

• Sub-daily data: +50% more stations (now serving over 29,000 stations)

• Daily data: +15% more stations (now serving over 86,000 stations)

• Monthly data: +14% more stations (now serving over 83,000 stations)

The consolidated dataset brings together land surface meteorological observations from hundreds of sources worldwide – including National Meteorological Services and others – in collaboration with international partners."

More information available here.

Snapshots

Earth from Space: Cyclone Errol [link]
"Errol was a powerful tropical cyclone, which formed as a tropical storm at the beginning of April 2025 and rapidly intensified while moving towards northern Australia, passing from category 1 to 5 in 30 hours."

Interesting reads

Air Quality Challenges in 2025: Europe’s Summer of Smoke, Dust and Ozone [link]
"The summer of 2025 significantly affected Europe’s atmosphere. From record-breaking wildfires in southern and western Europe, to intense Saharan dust intrusions and repeated peaks in surface ozone during prolonged heatwaves, air quality was negatively impacted by multiple events. Data from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) show how these overlapping events combined to create serious risks for human health and the environment across the continent. This Observer takes a closer look at what the data show. "

LinkedIn Highlights

"Uncalibrated imagery is nearly worthless" [link]
This quote from Christopher Robson captures a truth that often gets overlooked in the hype around satellite launches and new missions. Building an Earth Observation company isn’t just about getting to orbit - it’s about delivering usable, well-calibrated data products. Otherwise, it’s just another shoebox-sized satellite thrown into space.

Call for Papers

REO: Advances in Representation Learning for Earth Observation [link]
"The Representation Learning for Earth Observation (REO) workshop brings together researchers and practitioners from machine learning, computer vision, and Earth sciences to advance the development of robust, interpretable, and scalable models for monitoring our planet. With the growing availability of large-scale, multimodal Earth observation (EO) data and the rise of general-purpose foundation models, new opportunities and challenges emerge for integrating data-driven approaches across sensing modalities and application domains. REO will provide a forum for presenting novel technical methods, scientific applications, and system-level innovations, fostering cross-disciplinary exchange and collaborations between academia, industry, and policy stakeholders."

Submission deadline is extended to October 20

Related:
Advancing AI for Earth observation at the REO workshop [link]

Competitions

Contest ‘Seize the beauty of our Planet’ for the best satellite image of Earth [link]
"The annual international contest ‘Seize the beauty of our Planet’ recognizes the most beautiful satellite images of the Earth. This year’s theme is Cities and nature.

It is the 6th time that CloudFerro, a Copernicus Ambassador, is inviting Earth observation specialists, climate researchers and enthusiasts to join the contest and turn satellite data into powerful messages.

This year we are looking for best images on the theme of ‘Cities and nature’ as captured by Earth observation satellites.

Compelling images capture public and policy attention. We invite you to seize your best satellite-derived view of cities in balance with nature, and to help tell a story that matters for the planet. The imagery you enter can galvanize communities and policymakers to plan cities that thrive with nature and serve the people who live in them."

Deadline to submit and image: 26 October

Learning

PACE Data Hackweek 2025 Resources Now Available [link]
Recordings of the lectures, coding tutorials, and demo sessions from the 2025 PACE Data Hackweek are now live on the Hackweek website: https://pacehackweek.github.io/pace-2025/presentations/notebooks.html

NASA-ISRO Satellite Sends First Radar Images of Earth’s Surface [link]
"The NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) Earth-observing radar satellite’s first images of our planet’s surface are in, and they offer a glimpse of things to come as the joint mission between NASA and ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation) approaches full science operations later this year."

Level-2 News

Planet Releases First Light Image From Pelican-3; Multiple Pelican Launches Slated for the Next Year [link]
"Planet released first light images from its Pelican-3 satellite of Turin, Italy. It was taken on September 5, 2025, from an altitude of 458 km. Image quality is expected to improve as the spacecraft complete the instrument calibration process and reach their final operational orbits. "

Planet Ships 2 More Pelicans and 36 SuperDoves to Launch Site [link]
"Planet announced its Pelican-5 and Pelican-6 satellites and 36 SuperDoves of Flock 4H have arrived at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California ahead of their launch aboard the upcoming Transporter-15 Rideshare mission with SpaceX."

Planet and VITO Extend Long-Term Partnership to Accelerate Earth Observation Solutions for Agriculture and Environment [link]
"Planet and VITO announced an extension to their long-term partnership to accelerate the use of Earth observation for global impact. By bringing together Planet’s daily, global satellite imagery and VITO’s analytics and service platforms, the partners will deliver faster, more actionable insights for agriculture, global monitoring and environmental resilience."

Milestone for MicroCarb: First Earth Observations [link]
"On 28 August, the MicroCarb satellite captured its first view of Earth, marking a major milestone following its 25 July launch. The first images and measurements come from the Amazon Basin — a region that plays a crucial role in the global carbon cycle but where very few ground-based CO₂ observations exist."

"Carbon Dioxide Monitoring Mission (MicroCarb) is a microsatellite mission by the French Space Agency, CNES, with support from the UK Space Agency (UKSA), launched in July 2025. Considered a successor to other carbon dioxide missions such as Greenhouse gas Observing Satellite (GOSAT) and Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2), the objective of MicroCarb is to monitor the fluxes of carbon dioxide between the atmosphere, oceans and vegetation." [link]

HydroGNSS mission lands in California [link]
"The UK-built HydroGNSS mission, which will investigate the Earth’s water cycle, has landed in California and is ready to start preparations for launch. Built by Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL), in Guildford, HydroGNSS-1 and HydroGNSS-2 are part of the European Space Agency’s Scout programme – delivering rapid, low-cost Earth observation missions.

Once in orbit, the pair will track climate variables like soil moisture and flooding, using signals from existing GNSS satellites in innovative new ways. "

Maxar retires its name, rebrands as Vantor and Lanteris [link]
"The Maxar name is disappearing from the space industry as two successor companies emerge with distinct identities: Maxar Intelligence will now operate as Vantor, and Maxar Space Systems will go by Lanteris."

Albedo Drops its Commercial Imagery Business [link]
"Albedo Space, the Colorado startup operating the Clarity-1 imaging satellite in VLEO, is getting out of the commercial imagery game.

Albedo CEO Topher Haddad told Payload the company will abandon its imaging business to focus entirely on building VLEO satellite buses for other payload operators—a decision which includes laying off an undisclosed number of employees.

The shift comes in response to the better-than-expected success of Clarity-1, as well as market signals that VLEO demand will continue to increase for defense and commercial missions."

KSAT launches Integrated Mission Services [link]
"KSAT announced a new end-to-end offering that provides satellite owners with a seamless solution for mission operations, ground network access, and data delivery.

As the number of small satellites and large constellations continues to grow at unprecedented speed, IMS enables satellite owners to scale efficiently while reducing the burden of managing in-house ground infrastructure and operations teams.

KSAT’s Integrated Mission Services bundles launch support, satellite operations, and mission monitoring into a single subscription."

Developer's Orbit

scikit-eo - A Python package for Remote Sensing Data Analysis [link]
scikit-eo provides a rich suite of algorithms specifically designed for environmental studies. These include statistical analysis, machine learning, deep learning, data fusion and spatial analysis.
Researchers can leverage these tools to explore patterns, relationships, and trends within their datasets, to uncover complex land or forest degradation or mapping and classify the land cover, and generate insightful visualizations, among others tools.

Data

AgERA5 in Climate Engine was updated to version 2 [link]
AgERA5 in Climate Engine was updated to version 2, which comes with substantial updates. The big update is the new Penman-Montieth Reference ET (ETo) variable that is provided. This enables users to use existing functionality available in Climate Engine to calculate derived water balance and drought indicators such as the potential water deficit, the evaporative demand drought index (EDDI), and the standardized precipitation evapotranspiration index (SPEI).

AgERA5 is a global daily climate reanalysis dataset produced at a 0.1° resolution with about a one-week latency, enabling global assessment of drought conditions. It also contains snow indicators such as snow depth and snow water equivalent (SWE) and vapor pressure deficit (VPD).

Learn more about AgERA5 in Climate Engine [link]
Access the Google EarthEngine collection [link]

Snapshots

A Desert Intersection [link]
"In the Tarim Basin in western China, a curved ridge and winding river converge in a Y-shaped tangle of sand, rock, and water channels. Even from space, it’s easy to see why the colorful ridge—Mazartagh—is known in Chinese as Hongbaishan, or “red-white mountain.”

The OLI-2 (Operational Land Imager-2) on Landsat 9 acquired this image on September 11, 2025, showing where the river meets the ridge. The wall-like ridge stretches 145 kilometers (90 miles) to the northwest and rises about 200 meters (600 feet) above the surrounding desert. It acts as a natural barrier, trapping sand and blocking dunes from moving southward under the basin’s frequent northeasterly winds.

The Hotan River (also called the Khotan River) is a seasonal feature fed by glacial meltwater from the Kunlun Mountains, which line the basin to the south. The river carries large summer flows northward across the Takla Makan Desert until it meets the Tarim River in the far northern part of the basin."

Earth from Space: Kilauea lava lake, Hawaii [link]
"Located in the central Pacific Ocean, Big Island is the southeastern-most island in the US state of Hawaii and, as its name suggests, the largest in the archipelago. Having formed above a magma hotspot in the Pacific plate, Hawaii has some of the world’s largest active volcanoes. One of these is Kilauea on the southeastern side of Big Island.

This Copernicus Sentinel-2 image from 3 September 2025 shows a lava lake approximately 2.5 km in length, inside the main crater of Kilauea. Following an eruptive episode on 2 September, lava fountains reached about 100 m high and lava flowed from multiple vents in the main crater.

Although the image has been processed in natural colour, the mission’s shortwave infrared channels, which detect heat sources, were also used to highlight the fiery lava flowing from the crater in orange and red. Plumes of smoke can also be seen leaking from the crater."

Interesting reads

Understanding the long-term impact of earthquakes on slopes [link]
"When the ground trembles during a powerful earthquake, the danger doesn’t end once the shaking stops. Hidden threats like landslides and floods often emerge later, putting lives and infrastructure at risk weeks, months, or even years after the main event.

Collapsed buildings and fast-moving landslides make headlines, but earthquakes destabilise far more than what we see right away. Slopes destabilized by seismic shaking can slowly accelerate, eventually causing delayed landslides or floods. These long-term hazards remain poorly understood.

While much of today’s research focuses on co-seismic landslides (those that happen immediately during the quake), the AMHEI (Advancing knowledge of multi-hazards processes and their impact) project aims to uncover how slopes evolve in the months and years following a major earthquake, and how these changes might influence landslide and flood hazards."

Educating customers may be half the battle for nascent hyperspectral sector [link]
"A major barrier for hyperspectral startups isn’t launching satellites - it’s teaching customers what to do with the data. Companies like Kuva Space, Wyvern, and Pixxel are investing heavily in customer education through online training, hands-on demonstrations, and AI-powered interfaces that make exploring hyperspectral cubes more intuitive. Pixxel’s Aurora platform even lets users chat with their data, asking questions like “What am I looking at here?” to uncover insights once reserved for experts. As these efforts expand, education may prove just as critical as innovation in driving hyperspectral adoption."

Countdown to launch – Copernicus Sentinel-1D lifts off in November [link]
“2025 is another milestone year for the EU Space Programme.
Following the successful expansion of Copernicus with the launch of Sentinel-5A and Sentinel-4A earlier in the year, on 4 November 2025, Sentinel-1D will lift off from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, ensuring the continuity of services on which a wide range of end users rely worldwide.
Sentinel-1D joins Sentinel-1C, launched in December 2024. Both satellites are equipped with Galileo-enabled receivers for more accurate in-orbit positioning and carry an Automatic Identification System (AIS) payload which detects signals from ships, supporting maritime domain awareness and the detection of unauthorised activities at sea. Sentinel-1D’s launch aboard Ariane 6 reflects Europe’s growing capacity to put its satellites into orbit on its own terms, strengthening the resilience of Copernicus Services and the EU’s strategic autonomy.

This week’s Observer looks at the upcoming launch and the benefits the Sentinel-1 mission delivers.”

Climate

The 9th Edition of the Copernicus Ocean State Report warns that climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution currently affect all ocean basins [link]
"This year’s edition of the Copernicus Ocean State Report (OSR 9) highlights the deep and widespread links between ongoing ocean change and changes in marine ecosystems, human society, and the economy.
The global ocean is affected by record-breaking temperatures, accelerating sea level rise, and continued acidification, with no part of the ocean untouched by what the UN has termed the triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution.
The OSR 9 also highlights the importance of regional monitoring as a complement to global assessments and showcases new and improved monitoring systems and frameworks to help track the state of the ocean."

Landsat Celebrates Major Open Data Milestone [link]
"On July 14, 2025, downloads of Landsat products passed 200,000 terabytes (TB). This milestone highlights the vast scale of the Landsat archive and growing demand for its data.
This achievement stems from the 2008 policy change that made all Landsat products available for download from the U.S. Geological Survey for no-charge. In the last 17 years, scientists, land managers and the public have used this resource to understand the changes on our landscapes around the world. "

Planet Reports Financial Results for Second Quarter of Fiscal Year 2026 [link]
Planet had a strong Q2 FY2026, reaching record revenue of $73.4M (+20% YoY), generating $85M in operating cash and $54M in free cash flow so far this year. The company’s future business pipeline also surged, with backlog climbing to $736M. Key wins included a €240M multi-year contract with the German government, along with deals with NATO and the U.S. Navy, plus renewals with the UK RPA and SwissRe. On the technology side, Planet launched two new high-resolution Pelican satellites, expanding its next-generation constellation.

Planet Launches Two Additional High-Resolution Pelican Satellites [link]
"Planet announced that its high-resolution, AI-enabled Pelican-3 and Pelican-4 satellites were successfully launched to orbit on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The Planet team has successfully made contact with Pelican-3 and Pelican-4 and started the commissioning processes for these satellites.

Joining Pelican-1 and Pelican-2, Pelican-3 and Pelican-4 are the latest additions to Planet’s fleet of next-generation tasking satellites. Planet plans to launch additional Pelicans this year.

As Gen 1 Pelican satellites, Pelican-3 and Pelican-4 are built to provide up to 40 cm class resolution imagery across 6 multispectral bands optimized for cross-sensor analysis. Through Planet’s partnership with NVIDIA, these Pelicans are equipped with NVIDIA Jetson AI platforms to enable rapid on-orbit computing and the swift delivery of insights to customers."

SatVu, IHI Partner on Thermal Mapping Constellation [link]
"British space-based infrared mapping startup SatVu has partnered with Japan industrial company IHI Corporation to develop a high-res thermal infrared satellite constellation."

Related:
IHI collaborates with SSTL to develop Earth observation satellite constellation [link]

Satellogic Maps Out Exclusive India Deal with Suhora [link]
"Satellogic has signed a multi-year, seven-figure exclusive deal with Suhora Technologies, handing the Indian geospatial intelligence company distribution rights to Satellogic’s EO data in India and Nepal."

Esper Satellites Sends its Hyperspectral Sensor to Orbit [link]
"Australian startup Esper Satellite Imagery launched its Over the Rainbow-2 (OTR-2) hyperspectral camera to orbit yesterday—flying as a hosted payload aboard Dhruva Space’s LEAP-1 mission.

The payload, a near-infrared sensor, aims to help customers in agriculture, mining, and defense to better understand the minerals hidden beneath the surface of the planet. "

New Hyperspectral Satellite Startup Messium Targets Crop Monitoring [link]
"U.K.-based startup Messium looks to use hyperspectral satellites to monitor nitrogen in crops. The company announced a 3.3 million euro ($3.9 million) seed round this week, led by UK Innovation & Science Seed Fund (UKI2S) and Expansion Aerospace Ventures."

Idaho to Deploy Satellite-Based Wildfire Detection With OroraTech [link]
"The Idaho Department of Lands will deploy a statewide satellite-based wildfire detection and monitoring system through a new partnership with OroraTech USA.

OroraTech said Sept. 10 that the system uses both public and its own proprietary wildfire satellites and other public data sources. It is designed to provide fire location, intensity, and predicted spread. The company said this information can be shared with dispatch centers and firefighters within minutes."

Sumitomo Corporation Invests in Ursa Space [link]
"Sumitomo Corporation of Americas has invested into Ursa Space Systems to help the company serve customers across Asia, particularly in the Japanese market. The firm is the largest subsidiary of Japanese conglomerate Sumitomo Corporation."

Eutelsat partners with Skynopy to explore opening OneWeb ground stations to Earth observation [link]
"Eutelsat has teamed up with French satellite connectivity startup Skynopy to explore offering Earth observation operators spare capacity on the ground stations used for OneWeb, its low Earth orbit (LEO) broadband service.

The partnership will test reusing some of the Ka-band antennas across 42 OneWeb sites worldwide, Skynopy announced Sept. 11, a move that would represent a major expansion from the startup’s current network of 30 S- and X-band antennas across 15 sites."

GHGSat Satellites Deployed to Monitor Methane at Scale Across ExxonMobil’s Onshore Operations [link]
"ExxonMobil Corporation and GHGSat, announced a partnership to monitor and mitigate methane at scale across ExxonMobil’s onshore operations in North America and Asia, including the United States, Canada, Papua New Guinea, and Indonesia."

BlackSky and Iceye join group creating Earth’s digital twin [link]
"BlackSky and Iceye have joined forces with AI-visualization specialists Aechelon Technology and Niantic Spatial to create a digital twin of Earth. "

Developer's Orbit

SkyTruth Released a Codebase for Offshore Methane Detection [link]
"The repository contains experimental tooling for detecting offshore methane emissions using Sentinel-2 imagery. The codebase grew out of SkyTruth's research efforts and includes utilities for pixel masking, MBSP raster generation and plume polygon extraction."

Blog Post [link]

titiler-eopf - TiTiler application for EOPF dataset [link]
As part of the EOPF Explorer, Development Seed developed titiler-eopf, tailored from titiler-xarray using obstore to serve data from S3 object storage.
Follow this LinkedIn post for more.

Related:
We Needed Better Cloud Storage for Python so We Built Obstore [link]

Snapshots

Hurricane Kiko Nears Hawaii [link]
"Developing as a tropical depression in the eastern Pacific on August 31, 2025, Kiko intensified into a major hurricane while churning west toward the Hawaiian Islands. The storm weakened as it approached land and was forecast to skirt the islands to the north. Still, the state braced for dangerous surf from the passing storm.

The VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) on the Suomi NPP satellite acquired this image of Hurricane Kiko at about 1:30 p.m. Hawaii Standard Time (23:30 Universal Time) on September 7, when it was approximately 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) east of Hilo. At that point, Kiko had sustained winds of 110 miles (175 kilometers) per hour, according to the National Hurricane Center (NHC), making it a Category 2 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson wind scale."

Interesting reads

How Copernicus supports news coverage [link]
"Satellites provide a unique vantage point from above, enabling unparalleled observation of global events. Whether monitoring floods using radar data or providing insights into deforestation through optical imagery, the Copernicus Sentinel missions are instrumental in capturing the state of our planet in remarkable detail. Beyond their ability to help us monitor the Earth, Copernicus images also inform the public and empower storytellers and journalists to communicate environmental narratives in engaging and accessible ways.

Today’s Observer explores how Copernicus supports journalists around the world in sharing compelling stories about our planet with their audiences."

New U.S.-European Sea Level Satellite Will Help Safeguard Ships at Sea [link]
"Sea surface height data from the Sentinel-6B satellite, led by NASA and ESA, will help with the development of marine weather forecasts, alerting ships to possible dangers.

Because most global trade travels by ship, accurate, timely ocean forecasts are essential. These forecasts provide crucial information about storms, high winds, and rough water, and they depend on measurements provided by instruments in the ocean and by satellites including Sentinel-6B, a joint mission led by NASA and ESA (European Space Agency) that will provide essential sea level and other ocean data after it launches this November."

Climate

La Niña may return but temperatures are likely to be above average [link]
"La Niña may return to impact weather and climate patterns from September onwards, according to the latest World Meteorological Organization (WMO) El Niño/La Niña update. But despite the temporary cooling influence of La Niña, temperatures are still expected to be above average for much of the world."

Upcoming Events

A new era in Forest and Land Cover Monitoring [link]
"The Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (CLMS) is delighted to invite you to an in-depth webinar on the newly launched Land Cover and Forest Monitoring (LCFM) product suite. This event will take place on 25 September 2025, offering a unique opportunity to explore ground-breaking developments in global land-cover observation."

EOPF Zarr Hackathon: Driving Innovation in Cloud-Native Earth Observation [link]
"As part of this year’s Big Data from Space (BiDS25) conference, the EOPF Zarr Hackathon will offer a unique opportunity for the Earth Observation community to come together and explore cutting-edge, cloud-native technologies aimed at transforming how we access and process data from the Copernicus Sentinel missions.

This webinar is a joint effort between our service and the EOPF toolkit team, reflecting a shared commitment to advancing open, cloud-native approaches to Earth Observation.

Designed for participants of all levels, from newcomers to advanced users, the hackathon will focus on collaborative problem-solving and hands-on experimentation with the Earth Observation Processing Framework (EOPF) and its growing suite of tools and data services."

Webinar 7 – EOPF Zarr Data Access with openEO and STAC [link]
"Join this webinar on 25 September for a practical webinar showcasing how to explore and process the new EOPF Zarr data products using openEO and STAC.

As part of the Earth Observation Processing Framework (EOPF) initiative, this session demonstrates how standardised, cloud-native approaches make Earth observation workflows more FAIR – Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable. Whether you are new to openEO or looking to test the latest Sentinel Zarr data formats, this webinar will guide you through data access, building customised virtual data cubes, and simple processing steps."

Competitions

ThinkingEarth Hackathon: Shaping the Future of AI for Earth [link]
"The ThinkingEarth project is inviting innovators, developers, and Earth science enthusiasts to its first Hackathon, taking place 29–30 September in Riga, Latvia, as part of the BiDS25 satellite events.

Participants will get hands-on with cutting-edge AI tools — from Copernicus-scale Earth Observation foundation models to graph-based weather forecasting and vision-language models — and co-create new solutions across three open tracks:

• EO Foundation Models – Experiment with large-scale EO models and apply them to tasks like land cover mapping or biomass estimation.

• Weather Forecasting Models – Compare, evaluate, and push the limits of AI-driven weather prediction.

• EO Vision-Language Models – Explore how language and imagery can interact to make satellite data more accessible."

A bold new chapter for AI4EO with ‘ESA Φ-lab Challenges’ [link]
"With a new look and the same ambition, the rebranded ‘ESA Φ-lab Challenges’ return with a fresh momentum, inspiring the Earth observation and AI communities to drive innovation through a new series of impactful competitions."

Learning

Two-Day Fundamentals to Use Hyperspectral and Thermal Earth Observation Data Workshop Recordings Available Online [link]
"The two-day workshop event covers the fundamentals necessary to work with NASA's high-spectral resolution EO data, spanning the visible to short-wavelength infrared (VSWIR) and long-wavelength infrared (LWIR) parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. Presenters discuss measurement acquisition, standard pre-processing methods, data discovery, and working with key datasets from the Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT), ECOsystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station (ECOSTRESS), and Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, Ocean Ecosystem (PACE) missions.

The webinar also includes tutorials on how to synergistically use these EO datasets and offers tutorials for using open-source code and cloud platforms, and JavaScript in Google Earth Engine (GEE)."

• Agenda [link]

• Fundamentals for Using Hyperspectral and Thermal Earth Observation Data (Day 1) [link]

• From Space to Solutions: Access, Visualization, and Analysis Services for SWOT Hydrology [link]

• Workshop Presentations [link]

NRO Contracts Hydrosat’s Thermal Imaging Data [link]
"Hydrosat announced a follow-on contract with the NRO, giving the DoD and intelligence community access to the company’s thermal imaging data through the NRO’s strategic commercial enhancements program.

The deal is a follow-on to a $1.2M Stage 1 contract Hydrosat won in 2023, which tasked the company with performing modeling and simulating services.

Since then, Hydrosat has placed two sats in orbit—VanZyl-1 and VanZyl-2. The Stage 2 contract will give the NRO access to thermal data for a combined 10M+ sq km of the Earth imaged every day."

BlackSky Blames Politics For Revenue Hiccup [link]
"BlackSky Technology told investors last week that its 2025 revenue forecast fell by $12M to $20M due to “anticipated impacts of US government budget uncertainties, and volatility in contract timing.”

The $BSKY disclosure is another data point for investors watching to see how EO companies will fare under the new Trump administration."

Planet Signs Contract Extension with Colombia’s IGAC for Land Management [link]
"Planet has signed a multi-year contract expansion with Colombia’s government entity responsible for geographic data to continue to use Planet’s technology for land management, adding AI capabilities to track change management in roads and buildings."

Maxar Nabs $205M in International Contracts for Defense and Intel Capabilities [link]
"Maxar Intelligence on July 8 said it received $204.7 million in new multi-year contracts from three existing customers in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region to boost sovereign defense and intelligence capabilities for the undisclosed customers."

MethaneSAT Loses Contact With Satellite [link]
"Methane-monitoring satellite MethaneSAT has lost power and communications, the team behind the mission said in an update on Tuesday, July 1.

The MethaneSAT mission operations team lost contact with MethaneSAT on June 20, and the team learned on July 1 that the satellite lost power and is likely not recoverable."

Developer's Orbit

Orbio Earth open-sourced their codebase for satellite-based methane detection [link]
"Orbio Earth published a comprehensive tutorial to how they built their end-to-end methane pipelines over the last couple of years. Next to an extensive Q&A-like documentation, they are sharing large amounts of Orbio Earth’s production‑grade methane‑analytics pipeline—models, tooling, validation notebooks and reference datasets—released as open source under a non‑commercial licence."

"The repository contains

• Trained models to detect methane plumes for Sentinel‑2, Landsat 8/9 and EMIT.

• End‑to‑end notebooks covering inference and post‑processing to get from raw imagery to position and emission rates of methane plumes.

• Synthetic‑plume toolkit that injects physically realistic methane signatures into clean scenes for training and stress‑testing."

GitHub Repository: [link]
Full Documentation [link]

LEGO Mosaic from Sentinel-2: A Hands-On Earth Observation Installation [link]
"Development Seed collaborated with the Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem to create a physical LEGO mosaic from Sentinel-2 satellite imagery, transforming Earth observation data into a tangible and collaborative installation. Using openEO by TiTiler, they processed and visualized data from the Copernicus archive into color-enhanced tiles that attendees at ESA’s Living Planet Symposium 2025 assembled in real time."

GitHub Repository [link]

Zarr in the Browser — Fast, Flexible, and Surprisingly Powerful for Big Geo Data [link]
"In this article, Tobias Ferreira explores strategies to visualize Zarr-based multidimensional geospatial data in the browser using tools like titiler-multidim, carbonplan/maps, and zarr-gl. He compares their rendering approaches, performance, and trade-offs between server preprocessing and client-side interactivity. He also covers traditional methods like converting to Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFFs (COGs) and using NetCDF with GeoServer."

The Model is Not the Map [link]
Follow this blog post by where he argues that it's not enough to release a model and benchmark — deploying it on a real-world area is essential so people can assess its quality and performance beyond just the metrics.

A fast, flexible pipeline for 3D globe maps [link]
"Tim Meko built a quick-turn workflow to visualize forecast temperatures around the globe. It’s a modular pipeline that goes from raw forecast data to a polished 3D globe in a matter of minutes—adaptable for any global gridded dataset."

Snapshots

Earth from Space: Circles in the desert [link]
"This image from Copernicus Sentinel-1 shows circular agricultural structures near Tabarjal, in the barren desert of northern Saudi Arabia.

Most of Saudi Arabia has a desert climate and experiences temperatures as high as 50°C in summer. While there are virtually no permanent rivers or lakes in the country, large valleys called wadis fill with water during times of heavy rain. Most settlements are located along these valleys.

The area pictured lies within the Wadi As Sirhan basin and shows how Saudi Arabia’s desert is used for agriculture. Despite the dry climate, many irrigated crops are grown in the area.

The circles, each approximately one kilometre wide, are formed by central-pivot irrigation systems. These consist of a well at the centre of each circle, which supplies water from underground aquifers to rotating sprinklers. This type of irrigation helps farmers manage water in a more sustainable way to conserve this precious resource, which is not being replenished."

Interesting reads

A new app details where your food comes from — and just how fragile the global food system really is [link]
"A “first of its kind" tool could help untangle the complex global web of food supply chains and make it more resilient to climate shocks."

"Earth Genome announced the launch of Global Food Twin - a model of the world's entire food system!
They worked with Better Planet Laboratory to create a model that quantifies where food is produced, where it’s consumed, and maps every step of the supply chain. They also worked with Development Seed to turn this model into a proof of concept web application that allows a user to view food production across more than 3,700 global regions visualizing what food is produced, where it goes, who consumes it and how it gets there."

Explore the Global Food Twin web app [link]
GitHub Repo [link]

New Stories from Space: More Satellite Imagery in Data Journalism [link]
"Robert Simmon put together some of his favorite recent examples of data journalism that use satellite data as a key element."

How NASA Is Testing AI to Make Earth-Observing Satellites Smarter [link]
"A technology called Dynamic Targeting could enable spacecraft to decide, autonomously and within seconds, where to best make science observations from orbit.

In a recent test, NASA showed how artificial intelligence-based technology could help orbiting spacecraft provide more targeted and valuable science data. The technology enabled an Earth-observing satellite for the first time to look ahead along its orbital path, rapidly process and analyze imagery with onboard AI, and determine where to point an instrument. The whole process took less than 90 seconds, without any human involvement."

Inside ICEYE’s Flood Watch From Orbit [link]
"The deadly waters rushing down the Guadalupe River in Texas this month had first responders deploying helicopters, boats — and SAR satellites.

ICEYE, the Finnish space radar operator, mapped nearly 100 square miles for FEMA as the disaster unfolded. The company’s goal was to help search and rescue workers understand the extent of the deluge. ICEYE’s data will be used by insurance companies and banks in an effort to speed up the recovery process. "

CAMS tracks intense global wildfire activity in first six months of 2025 [link]
"The first half of 2025 was marked by intense wildfire activity in several areas around the world. From the boreal forests of Canada and Russia to the agricultural heartlands of Southeast Asia, and from temperate zones of Europe to the Korean Peninsula, wildfires and the resulting long-distance transport of smoke had significant impacts on air quality. The Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) has been tracking these global wildfires and monitoring the atmospheric impact in the affected regions and beyond. In this Observer, we look at some of the most significant wildfire activity in the first six months of the year, with a particular focus on two regions: North America and South and Southeast Asia."

Learning

Breaking Earth Observation Barriers: From Data Silos to Intelligent, Reliable Discovery | Element 84
"Jason Gilman presented at the Geo-AI Working Group on May 28, 2025.
Jason is Element 84's AI/ML Application Lead and a Principal Software Engineer with 20 years of experience in geospatial and Earth Observation.

Some of the key takeaways from Jason's presentation includes:

• Understanding EO Barriers: Understand why challenges like finding relevant datasets or downloading large files are still an issue despite technological advances.

• The Power of Foundation Model Embeddings: Learn why vector embeddings from foundation models represent the future of satellite data catalogs, enabling revolutionary capabilities like similarity searches, change detection, and intuitive classification without specialized expertise.

• Building Trust in Geospatial AI: Explore proven techniques for developing reliable, explainable natural language systems that can answer complex questions about our planet while providing transparent reasoning and accountable results."

Presentation: [link]

It was amazing attending the Living Planet Symposium last week (23–27 June 2025) in Vienna. It’s definitely a fantastic event to get inspired, meet people, have interesting discussions — and nerd out about space!

It’s been just three years since the previous LPS in Bonn (2022), and so much has changed in the meantime. The commercial sector had a much stronger presence this time. ESA's roadmap to ensure Copernicus data extends well into the 2040s, reflects a growing emphasis on long-term continuity. The research landscape has also pivoted: traditional methods are still around (thankfully, far fewer talks and posters using Random Forest), but there's clearly a strong shift toward deep learning and foundation models for EO, bringing in fresh talent from outside the EO bubble.

The Role of EO in a Changing World

“Without access to satellite imagery, we’d be attempting to serve the world blind.”

This is what Aarti Holla Maini, Director of the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, said in her speech at the opening plenary session.

The world is facing challenges on many fronts: climate change, pollution, biodiversity loss, food security, not to mention geopolitical tensions. Satellites — and Earth Observation (EO) more broadly — are not just tools; they are our eyes in the sky, enabling better decisions, faster responses, and more transparent monitoring of the planet.

Or as Diana Ürge-Vorsatz, Vice-Chair of the IPCC, beautifully put it:

“Sentinel-2 is a daily witness of our planet's beauty, fragility and change.”

The Bigger Picture

The “Geopolitical Situation” & European Independence

Josef Aschbacher, ESA's Director General, made it clear: Europe needs to step up its space ambitions and invest more in space programmes to catch up with the U.S. and China.

The conversation around strategic autonomy and technological sovereignty in space is becoming increasingly central. Europe has been working to strengthen its independent access to space — Ariane 6 is one part of that — but now we’re seeing a push for replacing non-European hardware with European-built components, driven by the current geopolitical climate.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, NASA is going through budget cuts — and that’s not just affecting NASA’s own missions, but also joint missions with other agencies. This includes potential impacts on Sentinel-6C. [link].

The budget cuts were visible at LPS too. Several sessions that were supposed to feature NASA researchers ended up half-empty. One session had eight scheduled speakers; only three presented.

10 Years of Sentinel-2

On June 23, 2025, exactly ten years to the day since Sentinel-2 was launched, a dedicated session celebrated its anniversary. We got a glimpse behind the scenes with personal stories and photos from the original teams. It was genuinely moving — the passion, the nostalgia, and the pride filled the room.

One thing everyone seemed to agree on: Sentinel-2 is the most popular and widely used European mission to date.

Beyond Land: Methane Monitoring with Sentinel-2

Although Sentinel-2 was originally designed for land applications, it’s been interesting to see how many new and sometimes unexpected uses have emerged over the past decade.

One example came from Itziar Irakulis Loitxate (IMEO, UNEP), in her talk “From Data to Action: Reducing Methane Emissions with Sentinel-2.” She presented how Sentinel-2 is now being used to detect methane plumes.

Through the Methane Alert and Response System (MARS), IMEO processes over 500 Sentinel-2 images per day, identifying around 100 methane plumes each month. What makes this work notable is that the detections are sent directly to governments and operators — turning them into actionable alerts. One example involved a persistent leak in Algeria. After IMEO reported it and followed up, the leak was addressed. The estimated impact was comparable to removing 500,000 cars from the road for a year. [link]

Data continuity in the 2040+

One of the recurring themes throughout the week was data continuity for the Copernicus programme. ESA has laid out a solid and ambitious roadmap to ensure Copernicus data extends well into the 2040s, building on the success of the current Sentinel missions through a combination of Next Generation (NG) missions and expansion missions. [link]

The Sentinel-2 NG mission will feature increased spectral bands, higher spatial resolution, and potentially even night-time observation capabilities.

Similarly, Sentinel-1 NG is planned with higher resolution, a wider swath width, and other improvements.

This stood in stark contrast to the situation across the Atlantic. While ESA is pushing forward with a long-term vision, the future of Landsat Next — NASA’s plan for continuity of Landsat data — is under threat due to budget cuts. NASA has been asked to restructure the mission and explore more affordable alternatives, putting the long-term availability of open U.S. optical data into question. [link]

ESA, on the other hand, is preparing to make the case for Copernicus expansion funding during the upcoming ministerial council meeting in November. It’s an ambitious plan, but one backed by strong user community feedback — a key ingredient in justifying the investment.

The Commercial Sector at LPS

It’s worth remembering that ESA, NASA, and other space agencies primarily launch science missions. But this year at LPS, perhaps more than ever before, we saw a surge in commercial missions that mirror or complement agency-led ones.

Thermal missions are a good example. While ESA is preparing to launch LSTM, and ISRO/CNES are working on TRISHNA (with NASA having originally planned SBG but potentially impacted by recent budget cuts), the commercial landscape is expanding with missions from companies like OroraTech, Hydrosat, SatVu, constellr, Aistech Space and others — all bringing their own thermal offerings into orbit.

The same applies to hyperspectral missions. Alongside missions such as EnMAP, PRISMA, and ESA’s upcoming CHIME, we now see commercial alternatives emerge: Planet’s Tanager constellation, Kuva Space's Hyperfield missions, and more — each aiming to bring high-frequency, high-resolution, hyperspectral data to market.

The sessions on Fire Detection and Monitoring from Earth Observation Data for Rapid Disaster Response featured several contributions from OroraTech — so much so, it could have almost been called “The OroraTech Session.” A particular highlight was how their data — for example, from FOREST-2 — complements public satellite missions. It stood out as a strong example of how combining commercial and public EO data can support actionable applications like wildfire detection and rapid response.

Another notable theme was the growing cooperation between agencies, academia, research centers, and the commercial sector. This blending of roles signals a shift: as new science missions come online, commercial missions are increasingly orbiting alongside them, offering complementary capabilities and helping bridge the gap between research and real-world impact.

But what we need isn’t just more satellites…

Still, bridging the last mile — from raw imagery or analytics to usable, sector-specific insights — remains one of the biggest challenges. That’s where much of the pressure now lies for the commercial sector: to not just deliver data, but to translate it into insights that fit real-world applications.

AI Alone Isn’t Enough

In recent years, Earth Observation has been closely intertwined with advances in AI — sometimes even leading the way [link]. But this growing focus on machine learning has come with a downside: many studies now seem more interested in showcasing the model than in understanding the Earth.

This concern was even raised during a plenary session — that what looks like a novel finding in a model’s output may, in fact, be something long known in the EO community.

We’re often presented with a model, a few metrics, and a couple of nice-looking maps — but with little effort to validate, interpret or ground the results in domain knowledge.

EO research shouldn’t be driven by AI expertise alone. It needs domain understanding — the kind that can question the inputs and interpret the outputs.

Final Thoughts

The Living Planet Symposium 2025 offered more than just updates on missions and methods — it captured the momentum, uncertainties, and vision for the future of the Earth Observation field.

For me, LPS is a celebration of what can be achieved when we work together. It’s not just a gathering to attend one more session; it’s a testament to international cooperation: agencies, researchers, engineers, and private companies all coming together to push the boundaries of what’s possible.

The conversations at LPS reminded me that Earth Observation isn’t just about observing the planet — it’s about understanding it, protecting it, and acting on that knowledge. After all, the satellites we rely on are called Sentinels for a reason: they’re guardians, watching over the Earth to help us respond, adapt, and safeguard what matters most.

See you at the next one.

Let’s Hear Your Highlights

LPS2025 was massive — it was hard to keep track of everything happening!

I’d love to hear what stood out for you.

Feel free to fill out this super short form (it’s really just one question!) about your favourite sessions, talks, posters, or takeaways. [link]

P.S. At the next LPS, I strongly encourage all exhibitors to follow the example of VITO (and ECMWF) — more chocolate at the stands, please.

Watch live: Living Planet Symposium 2025 [link]
"One of the biggest Earth observation conferences in the world will take place next week in Vienna. You can watch streamed plenary discussions and presentations each day on ESA Web TV.

ESA’s Living Planet Symposium will be held in the Austrian capital from 23 to 27 June.

The themes for the week are summarised in the symposium’s strapline “from observation to climate action and sustainability for Earth”. There will be discussions on how we can work together in the fields of Earth science and with the Earth observation industry to promote effective climate action to address the environmental crisis, with presentations also on new trends in Earth observation.

As many as 6000 participants are expected from up to 119 countries, including at least 800 members of the scientific community.

The event is organised with the support of the Austrian Research Promotion Agency and Austria’s Federal Ministry of Climate Action, Environment, Energy, Mobility, Innovation and Technology. It will be held at the Austria Centre Vienna.

Watch the sessions live on ESA Web TV."

Level-2 News

Planet Hits Free Cash Milestone [link]
"Planet reported positive free cash flow—$8M—for the first time as a public company in its first quarter earnings release on June 4."

Remote Sensing CEOs Call Out Risks of Potential Budget Cuts [link]
"A group remote sensing CEOs outlined the risks that come with potential budget cuts to commercial imagery programs in a letter to Congressional leaders."

BlackSky to Expand Constellation With Multispectral, Large-Area Satellites [link]
"BlackSky is planning to expand the capabilities of its Earth Observation (EO) constellation with multispectral, large-area collection satellites called AROS, to launch “as early as 2027.”

BlackSky explained the AROS satellites are designed to support country scale digital mapping, navigation, maritime, and 3D digital twin applications. The company said the AROS plan has been in development for the past two years and was a key factor in the company’s move to acquire the full stake in its manufacturer, LeoStella late last year."

Planet Wins New NATO Intelligence Deal [link]
"Planet has signed a new seven-figure contract with NATO to deliver advanced daily monitoring and intelligence capabilities across NATO’s strategic areas of interest. Planet called it a “landmark partnership” and noted that it comes at a time of significant global change, and European nations are “rapidly enhancing their defense capabilities to address evolving geopolitical dynamics. Planet announced the deal on June 12. Financial terms were not disclosed."

Portuguese Air Force Taps ICEYE for SAR Satellite [link]
"ICEYE has made inroads into Portugal with a breakthrough SAR satellite deal. The Portuguese Air Force, a branch of the Portuguese Armed Forces is purchasing one ICEYE SAR satellite, a ground segment and an antenna. ICEYE will deliver the satellite and other components to CTI Aerospacial, a joint venture between the Portuguese Air Force and CEiiA, a local center of engineering and innovation. The parties are in discussions relating to the purchase of additional satellites in the future. ICEYE announced the deal, June 13."

BAE Systems and Hanwha Systems to Collaborate on Multi-Sensor Satellite System [link]
"BAE Systems and Hanwha Systems have signed a new MoU to develop a multi-sensor satellite system to collect radio frequency (RF) and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data. "

Tomorrow.io Teams up with National Irrigational Administration for AI Weather Prediction Project in the Philippines [link]
"Low-Earth orbit satellite global weather intelligence provider Tomorrow.io will partner with the National Irrigation Administration (NIA) to help farmers adapt to climate change and boost productivity using Artificial Intelligence in the Philippines."

Iceye and IHI to Develop SAR Constellation in Japan [link]
"Iceye plans to develop a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) constellation with Japanese heavy industry company IHI Corporation under a new MoU announced Thursday. IHI and Iceye plan to establish a satellite manufacturing facility in Japan and develop a SAR constellation of up to 24 satellites."

Maxar partners with Array Labs to expand 3D imaging technology [link]
"Maxar Intelligence announced an agreement with radar imaging startup Array Labs to secure capacity on its constellation set to launch in 2026.

Array Labs, based in Palo Alto, California, is developing a 3D radar imaging constellation designed to operate in clusters, with swarms of small satellites working together to capture simultaneous images of the same location on Earth. Using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensors, Array Labs plans to capture high-resolution 3D imagery of the Earth regardless of lighting or weather conditions."

Marble Imaging starts developing easy access Earth Observation portal together with software company tenics [link]
"The "Dragoscope" project, which runs until the end of June 2026, will deliver the prototype for Marble's geospatial data portal "Kaleidoscope", allowing users to easily access public data as well as future Marble data and analytics.

The "Dragoscope" project is supported by a €450,000 grant from the development bank for Bremen and Bremerhaven (BAB)."

One ECMWF forum is now line! [link]
"The ECMWF forum was updated at the end of April 2025. It now has a fresh new 𝘭𝘰𝘰𝘬 and new categories and tags have been added to include all the latest exciting ECMWF products and services!

The forum is open to everyone and provides a platform for the ECMWF community to get involved in the latest discussions about ECMWF systems(e.g. AIFS, IFS and OpenIFS), services (e,g. DestinE and Copernicus) and data (e.g. Open Data, ERA5)."

Developer's Orbit

openEO by TiTiler: Open-Source Light and Fast Processing for Earth Observation [link]
"openEO by TiTiler has been officially released. This lightweight, high-performance backend implementation for openEO was developed through a collaboration between Development Seed and Sinergise, to provide a fast, open-source alternative for synchronous processing and visualization of Earth Observation data.

openEO by TiTiler is also deployed in CDSE, for the moment for demonstration purposes only. It is publicly available, allowing users to synchronously process and visualize Earth Observation data using the openEO API specification, with the speed and efficiency of the TiTiler engine."

Introducing Aurora: The first large-scale foundation model of the atmosphere [link]
"When Storm Ciarán battered northwestern Europe in November 2023, it left a trail of destruction. The low-pressure system associated with Storm Ciarán set new records for England, marking it as an exceptionally rare meteorological event. The storm’s intensity caught many off guard, exposing the limitations of current weather-prediction models and highlighting the need for more accurate forecasting in the face of climate change. As communities grappled with the aftermath, the urgent question arose: How can we better anticipate and prepare for such extreme weather events?

A recent study by Charlton-Perez et al. (2024) underscored the challenges faced by even the most advanced AI weather-prediction models in capturing the rapid intensification and peak wind speeds of Storm Ciarán. To help address those challenges, a team of Microsoft researchers developed Aurora, a cutting-edge AI foundation model that can extract valuable insights from vast amounts of atmospheric data. Aurora presents a new approach to weather forecasting that could transform our ability to predict and mitigate the impacts of extreme events—including being able to anticipate the dramatic escalation of an event like Storm Ciarán. "

Data

core-five: Multi-Modal Geospatial Dataset with Perfectly Harmonized Time & Space for Foundation Models [link]
"core-five is a pioneering dataset built for next-gen multi-modal vision models, unifying Earth Observation data from 5 essential sensors into perfectly aligned spatiotemporal datacubes.

• Sentinel-2 (S2) – Optical, 10m resolution, 2-4 Months per cube

• Sentinel-1 (S1) – Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), 2-4 Months per cube

• MODIS – Daily environmental and land indicators, 2-4 Months per cube

• Landsat-8/9 – Mid-res long-term optical data, 2-4 Months per cube

• High-Resolution Imagery – 20-30cm GSD (Multiple Sources)

Each data sample is organized per S2Sphere Tile ID, with a 2-4 month temporal stack, enabling consistent cross-modality representation for foundational model training and temporal reasoning."

"With a size of 12 TB+ (growing), it stands among the largest datasets hosted on Hugging Face.

Designed for:

• Pretraining large vision and multi-modal models

• Cross-resolution & cross-sensor fusion

• Spatio-temporal & vision-language learning"

Notebook [link]
LinkedIn Post [link]

Snapshots

Earth from Space: East Kalimantan, Borneo [link]
"Borneo, the world’s third largest island, is shared between Brunei, Malaysia and Indonesia. The area pictured here covers part of the East Kalimantan province in Indonesia, with the Makassar Strait to the east, a narrow passage in the west-central Pacific Ocean.

This radar image is from 31 March 2025, it is in false-colour and in ‘dual polarisation’ horizontal and vertical radar pulses. Compared to a single acquisition, this dual mode provides more detailed and complementary information about Earth’s surface. Different colours represent different types of land cover, such as yellow for dense vegetation and forests and dark blue for water."

Interesting reads

Global Views of PACE Land Vegetation Data [link]
"Launched in early 2024, NASA’s new Plankton Aerosol Cloud ocean Ecosystem (PACE) satellite provides the world’s first and only hyperspectral, global coverage of terrestrial ecosystems every 1-2 days. Hyperspectral satellite observations such as these can allow us to detect vegetation characteristics such as concentrations of leaf pigments which play important roles in plant photosynthesis and protection, advancing our ability to understand and measure regional forest and crop health and productivity from space."

AI-Supported Sea Ice Mapping [link]
"Mapping sea ice is essential for ship traffic in the Baltic Sea. EOC's Maritime Security Lab in Bremen has developed an AI-supported approach that will now be employed by the Ice Service of the Federal Maritime and Hydrographic Agency of Germany (BSH)."

Air Quality Analysis: validating satellite data with ground measurements in Limassol, Cyprus [link]
Satellites offer a global view of air pollution, but struggle to capture the fine-scale, ground-level concentrations that impact our health most directly. Official, ground measuring stations provide exact values, but they are expensive and sparsely distributed. The AirTRack system, developed jointly by Augsburg University and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), bridges this gap with a dense network of calibrated, low-cost sensors measuring pollutants like NO₂, PM, and ozone in real time. Combined with satellite data, it enables a far more complete and actionable picture of urban air quality.

S5P measures SO2 cloud over Sicily [link]
"On Monday, June 2nd, at around 11:00 a.m. local time, Mount Etna in Sicily erupted with a massive explosion. Shortly after the eruption, the European satellite Sentinel-5 Precursor (S5P) detected the volcanic sulfur dioxide (SO₂) cloud over Sicily for the first time. Since then, operationally processed S5P measurements at the Earth Observation Center (EOC) have continuously recorded the development of the volcanic emissions."

Competitions

Classification for Landslide Detection [link]
"The objective of this challenge is to create a model that effectively leverages SAR for cloud-covered regions while prioritising optical data where available, enabling accurate and reliable landslide detection."

CLGE launches the Young Surveyors’ Contest 2025 [link]
"If you, or you and your teammates, are 35 years old or less and you have undertaken your thesis or some research work at a European university in the department of geodesy, cadastre, mapping or geoinformation or if you have a relevant project in mind, in one of these fields, you are welcome to participate in the CLGE Young Surveyors’ Contest 2025! You work must have been finalised within the last 3 years, i.e. between 1 January 2022 and 28 July 2025."

Submission Deadline: 28 July 2025, 23:00 CEST

Related:
Meet CLGE Ambassador Mar Roca Mora – from Contest Winner to marine earth observation doctoral researcher [link]

The HYPERVIEW2 Challenge is LIVE [link]
"KP Labs and the ESA’s Φ-Lab, together with Warsaw University of Technology and Poznan University of Technology rejoin forces for a second time: With HYPERVIEW2, the AI4EO Challenges return to AI-enhanced in-orbit processing to advance more efficient and sustainable farming."

Learning

GDAL CLI Modernization
"The GDAL Project Steering Committee was pleased to announce the release of GDAL 3.11.0 on May 9th, 2025. The 2024 GDAL User Survey [1] showed the GDAL Command Line Interface (CLI) to be in need of modernization, and GDAL 3.11.0 is the first release to provide a substantial refactoring of the common interaction point of many with the nearly 27 year old software project.

The new CLI, driven by sub-commands of the 'gdal' main program [2], is more convenient, consistent, predictable, and capable. It provides a GDAL spin on CLI concepts from rasterio, git, and others. Existing GDAL CLIs will continue to be supported as-is, but we hope the new CLI will make it easier to explore, learn, and reason about GDAL while manipulating geospatial data."

Reach out!

I'll be attending the Living Planet Symposium next week. Happy to chat over coffee (or beer / wiener schnitzel), if you're around!

Applications are due Friday, June 13."

Level-2 News

Outstanding Sentinel1C commissioning completed with successful IOCR [link]
"On May 7th, the latest member of ESA’s Sentinel1 — Sentinel-1C — was released into operations after successful completion of its In-Orbit Commissioning Review (IOCR) at ESTEC in the Netherlands."

Iceye Continues European Expansion With Rheinmetall JV and Manufacturing Center in Spain [link]
"Iceye has made key moves in Germany and Spain as it continues to grow its presence in Europe. In Germany, it has signed an MoU with German defense manufacturer Rheinmetall to establish a joint venture for satellite production. In addition, Iceye is also launching a new research & development and manufacturing center in Valencia, Spain."

Planet Signs 7-Figure Contract Expansion with the German Government, Enabling Land and Water Management from Space [link]
"Planet announced the German Federal Ministry of the Interior and Community (BMI) and the German Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy (BKG) have signed a seven-figure contract with Planet with a one year term and an option to renew for two more years.

The deal includes a fixed rate of all of Planet’s data products over Germany, including insights from Planetary Variables, water monitoring services from Planet’s partner EOMAP and access to Planet’s Insights Platform. This data will inform a variety of use cases, including monitoring water, forests, agriculture, socio-economics, and land-use, and support federal monitoring campaigns and environmental assessments."

OroraTech Joins Forces with SkyFi to Expand US Access to Space-Based Fire Detection [link]
"SkyFi and OroraTech have entered into a strategic partnership to bring space-based thermal monitoring and wildfire detection to a broader US audience through SkyFi’s Earth intelligence platform."

OroraTech Readies for US Expansion with New Denver Headquarters [link]
"OroraTech is hoping to make its presence felt in the U.S. market after opening its U.S. headquarters in Denver. The company, whic is based in Germany and specializes in wildfire intelligence and risk assessment, hopes to support wildfire resilience in the United Sates. The Denver office will serve as a central hub connecting U.S. wildfire emergency services, utility providers and government agencies with OroraTech’s space technology. OroraTech announced the move, April 24."

IonQ to acquire Capella Space in bid to build ultra-secure quantum network [link]
"IonQ, a Maryland-based quantum computing company, announced May 7 it has reached an agreement to acquire Capella Space, the first U.S. firm to launch a commercial radar imaging satellite."

UP42 and Maxar Partner to Broaden Global Access to the Most Advanced Commercial Geospatial Intelligence [link]
"UP42 has partnered with Maxar to make Maxar’s very high-resolution satellite imagery and tasking products available in the UP42 platform. UP42 customers can now directly task Maxar’s very high-resolution constellation, including its WorldView Legion satellites."

Developer's Orbit

From Access to Application: EOPF Sentinel Zarr Samples Webinars

• Webinar 1: A new framework for data processing [link]
  "The first webinar in this new series introduces a structured approach to adopting the EOPF Zarr data format, catering to a broad spectrum of users. It provides an in-depth exploration of the EOPF Sentinel Zarr Samples, outlining their core functionalities, advantages, and potential applications in data processing and analysis. The session includes a detailed walkthrough of the format’s structure and capabilities, highlighting how it facilitates more efficient data access and storage.

  The second part of the webinar is a live tutorial utilising Jupyter notebooks, offering participants a practical demonstration of how to work with the EOPF Sentinel Zarr Samples. This hands-on segment provides step-by-step guidance on accessing, manipulating, and analysing the data within this framework, showcasing best practices and useful techniques for seamless integration into existing workflows."

• Webinar 2: Hands on with Sentinel 2 L2A EOPF Zarr [link]
  "This webinar is a hands-on introduction to working with Sentinel-2 L2A data in the EOPF Zarr format, aimed at users interested in more efficient ways to access and work with Earth observation data."

Right-sizing STAC [link]
"Most cloud-native Earth data platforms rely on powerful infrastructure to deliver metadata search at scale. Development Seed is exploring how to make geospatial metadata more portable, efficient, and cost-effective by combining the flexibility of STAC with the lightweight power of GeoParquet."

Zarr + STAC [link]
"As part of Element84's work writing a STAC + Zarr Report for the Cloud Optimized Geospatial Formats Guide their team is exploring the partially overlapping goals of STAC and Zarr and offering suggestions for how to use them together. This effort is particularly relevant currently due to several recent developments in the space that they discuss later in this post."

OpenAerialMap v2: Faster, Better Imagery Access for Humanitarian Mapping [link]
"OpenAerialMap is evolving to provide faster, more reliable access to satellite and drone imagery for humanitarian mapping. With a new STAC-based infrastructure and modern tools, HOT and Development Seed are rebuilding OAM to meet today’s urgent mapping needs. Discover how this upgrade will improve interoperability, speed, and usability for disaster response and recovery efforts."

OpenPV - Open-source PV forecasts throughout Germany [link]
"The openpv.de website provides users with a comprehensive understanding of solar energy potential of their building. By utilizing openly available 3D building data, socalled LOD2 data, openpv.de offers an accurate representation of how solar energy can be harnessed both on roofs and facades."

• Website [link]

• OpenPV on GitHub [link]

Data

Sea Surface Salinity Datasets Now Available on the SNWG Earthdata Search Portal [link]
As part of the Satellite Needs Working Group (SNWG)’s Sea Surface Salinity (SSS) with Sea Ice Mask solution, three products were recently added to the SNWG Earthdata Search Portal:

• Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) Level 3 Sea Surface Salinity Standard Mapped Image 8-Day Running Mean V5.0 Validated Dataset

• RSS SMAP Level 2C Sea Surface Salinity Near Real-Time (NRT) V5.0 Validated Dataset

• RSS SMAP Level 3 Sea Surface Salinity Standard Mapped Image 8-Day Running Mean V5.3 Evaluation Dataset

These products help address the need for low-latency measurements of sea surface salinity near the sea-ice edge, a gap identified during the SNWG 2020 assessment.

ALOS-2 ScanSAR Data Now Available in Earthdata [link]
"NASA has released a powerful, high-resolution radar dataset that is useful for studying Earth in extraordinary detail and compatible with measurements from upcoming missions.

The Alaska Satellite Facility Distributed Active Archive Center (ASF DAAC), in partnership with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), recently began publishing a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) dataset mirrored from JAXA's Advanced Land Observing Satellite-2 (ALOS-2) archive: the ALOS-2 PALSAR-2 Level 1 ScanSAR product.

The Earth observation data from ALOS-2 began in 2014 and are appropriate for many types of surveys, including ice sheet and landscape topography, vegetation analysis, geodynamic measurements, and disaster response. Earthdata’s first available ALOS-2 ScanSAR imagery covers North and South America and selected additional regions worldwide.

What’s more, ALOS-2 uses an L-band radar similar to the one that will be launched aboard the upcoming NASA/Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) SAR (NISAR) mission, making data from the platforms scientifically compatible with each other."

Snapshots

Earth from Space: Northwest Sardinia, Italy [link]
"With an area of about 24 090 sq km, Sardinia is the second-largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, after Sicily. It is situated about 200 km west of the Italian peninsula, a similar distance north of Tunisia, and is separated from the French island of Corsica by just 12 km."

Interesting reads

Why is Space-Based Decision Making so Hard to Do? [link]
Cassidy Rankine unpacks why using satellite observations to drive business and management decisions is difficult and it all comes down to uncertainty.

• Confidence needs accumulation: One observation often isn’t enough—repeated captures reduce uncertainty and increase decision confidence.

• Observation ≠ information: Frequency of information required and the frequency of observation are two very different things. It’s not about many images—it's about confidence in the composite.

• Spectral data is noisy: Real-world spectral curves are impacted by ~400 km of atmosphere and sensor limitations, making interpretation challenging.

• Ground validation is critical: Without in-situ references, satellite-derived insights risk losing/limiting accuracy.

Nation at a Crossroads: FY2026 Budget Proposal Threatens to Dismantle U.S. Geospatial Supremacy, Risking Economic and Infrastructural Integrity [link]
A 22.6% slash to non-defense federal funding in the proposed FY2026 U.S. budget could devastate the geospatial and Earth observation ecosystem. Over $3 billion in proposed cuts directly target:

• NOAA: $1.5B+ cuts jeopardize climate, weather, and satellite data streams vital to agricultural technology, coastal management solutions, insurance modeling, and logistics.

• NASA Earth Science: $1.16B cut undermines Landsat Next and global EO continuity.

• USGS: $564M cut threatens core mapping, 3DEP, hydrography, and climate/ecosystem data.

This isn’t just a budget—it’s a potential unraveling of the U.S. geospatial enterprise.

How Earth observation satellite operators are teaming up to tip and cue one another [link]
"When imagery from the Worldview Legion satellites revealed fabric over a large object near a dry dock in North Korea in September, satellite operator Maxar Intelligence knew they needed help. They turned to Umbra Space, a company that focuses on synthetic-aperture radar imagery, for follow up. Umbra’s sensors are not obstructed by clouds, darkness or even thin fabrics. And so after tasking a satellite on orbit, Umbra’s team ultimately revealed what was under the netting: the outline of a submarine."

Climate

New version of the Copernicus Interactive Climate Atlas dataset and viewer [link]
"ECMWF announced that the new version (v2) of the Copernicus Interactive Climate Atlas (C3S Atlas) dataset and viewer has been published on 07-05-2025."

New C3S Atlas User Tools are also available [link]
Copernicus Interactive Climate Atlas Viewer [link]

LinkedIn Highlights

"What do geospatial tools and music editing software have in common?" [link]
Have a look at this post by Anthony Boyd, Product Manager at Development Seed. Apparently, when the company built the Exploration and Analysis tool for the VEDA Dashboard, they borrowed an idea from… Music editing software!

"As a scientist, there is always this one question on my mind; how much of what we do, actually reaches out to the public?" [link]
Not exactly related to usual content of this newsletter, but I found it really interesting. In this post, Kyriaki Kalimeri, researcher at the ISI Foundation, writes about their study "The role of science in the climate change discussions on Reddit" and their key findings.

Upcoming Events

Kickstart your Earth Observation journey with WEkEO’s Beginner-Friendly Webinar Series “WEkEO Essentials” [link]
"This spring, WEkEO is launching WEkEO Essentials, a three-part webinar series designed to empower newcomers in the Earth Observation community. Whether you are a student, an early-career professional, or simply curious about exploring environmental data, this series offers an inspiring, accessible entry point.

Through these sessions, participants will gain practical insights into working with atmosphere, climate, land, and ocean data – and by the end, they will have a solid understanding of the full range of WEkEO’s tools and how to apply them effectively in research and projects."

Geospatial Information Services in Support of United Nations Operations [link]
"This webinar will explore how GIS and Remote Sensing are transforming UN operations—supporting data-driven decisions in some of the world’s most challenging contexts"

Date & Time: 15 May | 16:30–17:15 CET

GeoBeer #49 [link]
"GeoBeer 49 will take place on the evening of 12 June (from 18:15) in Stadt St.Gallen. They have an exciting program with lightning talks, among others by Gjore Milevski of Development Seed about "Beyond the raw data – Building open science interfaces for Earth Observation"."

Learning

Cubes & Clouds 2.0 is out! [link]
The new version of the MOOC Cubes & Clouds is available again with plenty of new things to learn!
The new version includes content and exercises with the Pangeo ecosystem, a new lecture named Formats & Performance including an exercise measuring your algorithm energy consumption, parallel processing and chunking strategies.

All the course content is also available on GitHub for free.

• MOOC: [link]

• GitHub: [link]