News

Following the downward trend of recent years, the area covered by sea ice in Arctic has reached its lowest value since satellite observations began at end of the 1970’s.

An hourly Saharan dust index product generated by Meteo-France/CMS (Centre de Météorologie Spatiale) from SEVIRI sensor onboard Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) is now available at CERSAT. It is provided in near real time, in netcdf-4 format.

The purpose of this User Consultation Meeting (UCM) was to bring users and experts in the field of EO (calibration, validation, data merging, algorithm development) and service delivery together to present their detailed requirements for ocean surface current products and services. Conclusions and stated user requirements from this meeting will be used to define the scope and develop guidelines for a potential Data User Element (DUE) project "GlobCurrent" competitively funded by ESA. GlobCurrent will demonstrate the feasibility of a unified service for ocean surface currents linked to external user applications.

Presentations from this meeting are available here.

ERS-2 was de-orbitated on 6th July, ending a 15 years long mission of earth observation. For us, this was also the celebration of the 20 years of CERSAT initially created and funded in support to ERS mission.

These daily wind fields from Metop/ASCAT scatterometer retrievals are produced in near real-time over global ocean with a spatial resolution of 0.25°. They are in netCDF format and span from April 2007 to present/

Ifremer has been monitoring coastal waters from space for many years using SST, chlorophyll and turbidity levels derived from satellite observations, as a contribution to several European environmental monitoring frameworks. We are in particular committed to provide rapid alert in case of eutrophication or HAB (Harmful Algal Bloom) occurring in areas under our responsability. The exceptional bloom of karenia mikimotoi that took place in July 2010 in the Channel is such an example of an early detection which emphasizes the benefit of using satellite observation as a support to coastal environment monitoring.

2009 is the third-lowest Arctic sea ice extent observed, consecutively to the 2007 and 2008 minima

Because of weak inputs of nutrients in the surface mixed layer, chlorophyll concentration always remains low in the subtropical gyres. These weak inputs of nutrients are due to the downward Ekman pumping and to the deep nutricline. The now available decade of satellite sea colour data gives us the opportunity to follow the evolution of the chlorophyll concentration on these poorly-cloudy areas.

This summer, sea ice extent is lower than the 2005 minimum extent (the second-lowest extent observed).

The entire 16-year surface turbulent fluxes estimated from satellite observations are reprocessed. The main improvements with respected to previous products are related to the assessment of the surface winds retrieved from ERS-1, ERS-2, and QuikSCAT scatterometers, and to the use of the new NOAA sea surface temperature estimates. The latter are daily-averaged and 0.25° in longitude and latitude over the global ocean. The new turbulent fluxes are estimated using Fairall et al (2003) bulk algorithm. The resulting weekly and monthly 10-m wind speed (W), 10-m specific air humidity (Qa), 10-m air temperature (Ta), wind stress (tau), latent heat flux (LHF), and sensible heat (SHF) flux fields are first validated against weekly and monthly averaged in-situ data. At global scale, the spatial and temporal satellite flux patterns are compared to those from HOAPS3, OAFLUX, ECMWF, and ERA40 fluxes.