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Thales Alenia Space España is awarded contracts worth more than €11 million for the MUSIS program

15:22 GMT, June 7, 2011 Thales Alenia Space España has been awarded important contracts summing up to a value of more than 7.5 million Euros. These contracts are for the MUSIS program for Earth observation. The company will be entrusted with the design, development, manufacturing, qualification, supply of electronics for the focal plane of the optical instrument (FPPB), and the service module (MSI) for the two first high optical resolution CSO satellites of the European MUSIS program, while having the option of a third one.

The CSO (Optical Space Component) is the French government contribution to the future MUSIS (Multinational Space-based Imaging System) constellation, that will include optical and radar space components. The CSO satellites realization contract has been awarded end 2010 to Astrium by CNES, who was acting as delegate contracting authority on behalf the DGA (Direction Générale de l’Armement). These satellites will replace the current Helios 2 observational system.. Thales Alenia Space France is responsible for the Optical Payload (Instrument) and also will deliver to Astrium, the Solar Arrays, the X-band downlink sub-system and the Encryption Unit.”

The Multinational Space-Based Imaging System (MUSIS) is a multinational program carried out by various European countries. The objective is to construct a common space infrastructure by combining national and/or bilateral programs, allowing the collaboration of these nations and providing them with the next-generation of European satellite intelligence systems, substituting their current national platforms. Through this, the contributing countries will reinforce their capacities and autonomy in the issue of surveillance, observation and reconnaissance.

Within the Thales Group, Thales Alenia Space España is considered to be a competence centre with regard to optical payloads of medium resolution (between 5 and 10 meters) used for scientific and Earth observation. The company uses a pioneer optical detection laboratory for the design, development and integration of subsystems for optical detection, allowing precise characterization of image sensor, integration and detection systems tests. Similarly, Thales Alenia Space España is extremely active in various projects, such as the national (Spanish) program of Earth observation INGENIO, the SENTINEL satellites for Europe’s Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) programme, and is currently working on a civil and military satellite for a member state of the NATO, developing the high resolution electronic proximity for optical observation; all adding up to contracts worth more than 30 million Euros.

Juan Garcés de Marcilla, President and CEO of Thales Alenia Space España said: “I am extremely satisfied with the awarding of this contract, it recognizes our ability and leadership in payloads for optical observation, as well as showing the trust which our clients have in our company.” Garcés de Marcilla also said to “feel proud of the excellent competitive development in the exterior market, as it is the competition which allows us to strengthen our collaboration with the largest European space companies, consolidating and placing us at the forefront of the Spanish market in terms of technology for missions of observation and science.”

Thales is a global technology leader for the defence & security and the aerospace & transport markets. In 2010 the company generated revenues of £11.2 billion (€13.1 billion), with 68,000 employees in 50 countries. With its 22,500 engineers and researchers, Thales has a unique capability to design, develop and deploy equipment, systems and services that meet the most complex security requirements. Thales has an exceptional international footprint, with operations around the world working with customers as local partners.

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Fish farming is the world’s fastest growing food production method and is projected to continue rising to meet the demands of an increasing world population. ESA’s new Aquaculture project will support sustainable aquaculture by developing an information service based on state-of-the-art remote sensing.

Satellites can provide a wealth of data on waves, sea-surface temperature and ocean colour – all highly useful for planning where to establish new fish farms.

“Sustainability depends on knowledge of the environment to draw useful conclusions for aquaculture,” said Juan Pablo Belmar from the Chilean Under-Secretariat of Fisheries.

“It is clear that remote sensing is one of the most useful tools for providing this knowledge.”

The environmental impact of new sites can be determined by comparing satellite-based water quality data from different periods. Satellite data can also play a key role in protecting farmed shellfish and finfish.

Phytoplankton blooms are common and usually harmless. But in some cases they reduce oxygen levels in water by preventing gas exchange between the ocean and the atmosphere, by blocking the light needed for other oxygen-producing algae below, and when decomposing.

These harmful algal blooms have devastating effects on farmed fish, which are unable to move into better-oxygenated stretches of water.

Some algae contain toxins that accumulate in the body tissue of shellfish and pose serious health risks for humans.

Satellites can warn of potential harmful algal development by identifying the conditions, such as sediment flows or pollution run-off, that might promote their growth.

Once a bloom begins, ocean colour sensors can map its extension and monitor its evolution.

chile,“There are great opportunities for using this type of technology to control aquaculture activities and monitor the surrounding environment both for sustainability and warnings of algae and jellyfish ‘attacks’,” said Ingrid Lundamo from Marine Harvest Norway. Marine Harvest is the world’s largest producer of farmed Atlantic salmon.

Satellite data can also be fed into models simulating the spread of parasites and disease in farmed fish stocks.

Diseases can devastate fish stocks: the production from Chile’s salmon farms fell from 400 000 tonnes in 2005 to 100 000 tonnes in 2010 as a result of infectious salmon anemia.

These models can help to reduce the risk of contamination between production sites by improving site selection and supporting measures to protect the farmed fish.

To fine-tune the requirements of the project’s potential users and to identify the types of satellite data needed, ESA organised a meeting last month with 35 potential users and experts in remote sensing applications.

The Aquaculture project will develop and demonstrate products and services tailored to the needs of the marine aquaculture sector, involving users from industry and from public administrations in Europe and developing countries.

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A satellite that will map the saltiness of seawater has gone in orbit. Data from the Aquarius/SAC-D spacecraft will help scientists understand better the processes that drive ocean circulation and the movement of freshwater around the planet.

A Delta rocket carried the satellite aloft, launching from California, US, at 0720 local time (1420 GMT). The mission is led by the space agencies of America and Argentina (Nasa and Conae). There are inputs also from Brazil, Canada, France and Italy.

Scientists have been able to measure ocean salinity for decades by lowering instruments from ships or by deploying robotic floats, but the technology to sense this property from orbit is a recent innovation.

Salinity is of interest to researchers because it is both a determinant of ocean behaviour and a tool to diagnose what might be happening in the climate system.

Aquarius carries three high-precision radio receivers that will record the natural microwave emissions coming up off the water’s surface. These emissions vary with the electrical conductivity of the water – a property directly related to how much dissolved salt it is carrying.

Together with temperature, salinity will define water density, and density and wind are the wheels of ocean circulation – the means by which Earth moves much of the energy it receives from the Sun around the globe.

By monitoring changes in the amount of dissolved salts at the surface, scientists can see also where water is being evaporated and precipitated.

Evaporation at the surface increases salinity by leaving behind salts as the water moves into the atmosphere. When it rains, the surface is diluted and salinity drops. In this sense, the amount of salt present is a tracer for the global water cycle. It is thought something like 80% of this cycle – which moves fresh water from the ocean to the atmosphere, to the land, and back to the ocean again – occurs out over the sea.

Eric Lindstrom, an Aquarius programme scientist at Nasa, said the new satellite would fill an important gap in the remote sensing observations made by the American agency.

“In the Earth science division of Nasa, we have 13 missions in orbit right now and about half of them measure ocean quantities – we get sea-surface temperature, ocean winds, sea level, ocean colour, and the changing mass of the oceans,” he explained.

“A key missing piece that’s really in demand by the ocean science community is ocean salinity.”

Getting this data from orbit is not a simple matter, however.

The range of salinity that can be measured is a small one – generally between about 32 and 37 parts per thousand out over the open ocean.

Ocean salinity map (ESA) Europe has already begun to make space-based maps of salinity; soon, scientists will have double the data and an even better view of the subject

“Our goal is to retrieve salinity at 0.2 parts per thousand,” said Aquarius Principal Investigator Gary Lagerloef of Earth & Space Research in Seattle. “That’s the equivalent concentration if you were to take a dash of salt about the same as one-eighth of teaspoon and put it in a gallon of water.

That works out to about one millilitre of salt in six litres of water.

“That’s the amount of salinity change that Aquarius will be able to observe from month to month over any part of the ocean.”

The Nasa-Conae spacecraft will not be the first ocean salinity mission in orbit. Europe already has a satellite in operation called Smos. This was launched in 2009 and produced the first-ever global maps of salinity built from space data.

Before it achieved this milestone, Smos had a torrid time coping with interference from radars, TV and radio links, and even wi-fi networks whose emissions were bleeding across the microwave signal. But Gary Lagerloef says the different radiometer design on Aquarius should fare much better, and he looks forward to getting double the data.

“The two teams have worked in parallel for a decade now, developing their respective missions; we have shared information and it has been a strong cooperative effort,” he told BBC News.

“Once we have both of these missions in orbit, we will compare results – we’ll inter-calibrate them, we’ll combine the measurements together. We’ll do all we can to provide the best information about ocean surface salinity to the scientific community.”

The Aquarius/SAC-D spacecraft weighed about 1.3 tonnes at lift-off.

Its radiometers are complemented by a radar instrument which studies how wind is roughening the sea surface and potentially skewing the microwave signal. All this equipment is provided by Nasa.

Conae has been responsible for the spacecraft bus, or chassis. This bus also hosts seven instruments – most built by the Argentinians.

These systems will be making a wide range of observations – from the imaging of urban lighting and monitoring forest fires to looking for space debris and making measurements of sea-ice.

Nasa had been under some pressure with this launch. Its previous attempt to get an Earth observation spacecraft into orbit ended in failure when the carrier rocket malfunctioned. The Glory satellite fell into the Southern Ocean off Antarctica and was destroyed.

Aquarius/SAC-D Nasa has provided the ocean salinity instrument; Conae has provided the main satellite bus and a number of other instruments. The spacecraft will circle the Earth, travelling from pole to pole

by Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk
BBC

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) seeks public comment on the candidate standard “Earth Observation Metadata profile of the OGC Observations and Measurements Standard.”

The Earth Observation (EO) profile of Observations and Measurements is intended to provide a standard schema for encoding Earth Observation metadata to support the description and cataloguing of products from sensors aboard EO satellites.

This second version of the Earth Observation metadata profile is based on Observations and Measurements, an OGC and ISO standard used in several communities. For example, O&M is used as a basis for the application schemas in several draft INSPIRE Annex II+III data specifications.

The metadata elements defined in this candidate standard are applicable for use in catalogues and applications, including various EO cataloguing applications based on OGC standards like the ebRIM Application Profile of the OGC Catalog Services – Web (CS-W) Interface Standard.

EO products are differentiated by parameters such as date of acquisition and location as well as characteristics pertaining to the type of sensor, such as cloud, haze, smoke or other phenomena obscuring optical imagery. Metadata used to distinguish EO product types are defined in this candidate standard for generic products and also for specific thematic EO products, such as optical, radar, atmospheric, altimetry, limb-looking and synthesized products. In addition, this document describes the mechanism used to extend these schemas to specific EO missions.

The candidate OGC Earth Observation Metadata profile of Observations & Measurements Standard document is available for review and comment at http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/requests/77

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 415 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC Standards support interoperable solutions that “geo-enable” the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC Standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org

Source

Managing Biodiversity, Cultural Heritage and the Movement of People in Norfolk County: How Satellite Services Can Help


Norfolk County Case-Study Recommendations

This report is an introduction to how the actors of a regional authority – in this case Norfolk County Council – can use satellite applications to promote and protect natural and cultural heritage, and tackle the challenges of climate change locally.

As a case-study, its focus is on analysing and defining local needs, before matching them with practical recommendations from satellite application experts. This means that regional and local authorities, who are faced with similar challenges, can seek inspiration from their peers as to how to organise themselves to implement and use these innovative solutions.

The report is the outcome of the case-study workshop hosted by Norfolk County Council in Norwich on the 20 January 2011.

Eurisy is grateful to Norfolk County Council, Coast Alive! and the experts involved for making this possible.

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(Source Eurisy)

On 21 June 2011, the first sea-ice thickness map of the Arctic was presented by the European Space Agency (ESA) at the Paris Air and Space Show. ESA’s CryoSat mission has spent the last seven months delivering precise measurements to determine changes in the thickness of Earth’s ice, which is necessary to fully understand how climate change is affecting the fragile polar regions.

CryoSat measures the height of the sea ice above the water line, known as the “freeboard”, to calculate the thickness. The measurements used to generate this first map of the Arctic were from January and February 2011, as the ice approaches its annual maximum. The data are exceptionally detailed and considerably better than the mission’s specification. They even show lineations in the central Arctic that reflect the ice’s response to wind stress.

A new map of Antarctica has also been created showing the height of the ice sheet. In addition, detail of edges of the ice sheet where it meets the ocean can now be closely monitored thanks to CryoSat’s sophisticated radar techniques. This is important because this is where changes are occuring.

Further information can be found at ESA

Source GMES.Info

Over the last two years the European Space Agency (ESA) has been funding a project aiming to establish a ‘service concept’ based upon satellite Earth Observation (EO) technologies that could be applied to monitoring of CO2 capture and storage facilities.

Fugro NPA One of the biggest challenges facing the CCS industry is demonstrating that CO2 capture and storage is safe, effective and can be achieved at industrial scale at a competi­tive cost.

The establishment of test sites in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and elsewhere indicates a growing need to address the lack of existing infrastructure currently in place to capture CO2 from industrial and power generation plants and store it in underground reservoirs available in the form of previously exploited oil and gas fields or other alternative storage sites/technologies.

Over the last two years the European Space Agency (ESA) has been funding a project aiming to establish a ‘service concept’ based upon satellite Earth Observation (EO) technologies that could be applied to industry and government, and that would support the establishment and monitoring of CO2 capture and storage facilities as part of future emissions-reduction and carbon-trading initiatives.

Project participants included: SciSys UK (lead), a company which has worked in all aspects of the space industry for many years from ground stations to on-board satellite software, Fugro NPA Ltd (UK), an acknowledged world leader in EO and specifically terrain-motion mapping from space, TNO, the largest fully independent research, development and consultancy organisation in the Netherlands, the British Geological Survey who are actively involved in the monitoring of many of the CCS sites, and AEA Technology, whose role was to provide user consultants and expose service concepts to key stakeholders within the industry.

Current Capabilities in EO

A wide range of EO application services were considered in the project, including terrain-motion measurement, geological modelling, gravimetry, pipeline monitoring, land cover and ecosystem monitoring, vessel-tracking, sea-state forecasting, intelligent in situ sensor webs, real-time telemetry and monitoring of complex systems.

Conventional EO-based geological mapping is regarded as a routine tool used by most oil and gas producers when exploring for new reserves, planning surveys and establishing baselines for the monitoring of sites. However its wider application to CCS may not be relevant as most if not all CO2 to be stored is envisaged as filling existing, commercially depleted reservoirs where the geology has been largely determined during the discovery phase.

Ecosystem analysis to detect indications of vegetation stress linked to gas seepage and other factors is reasonably well developed using EO techniques and data sources available today, although not necessarily at resolutions always applicable to specific CCS sites. One of the research areas of CO2GeoNet (a non-profit association joining together 13 partners spanning 7 European countries

(www.co2geonet.com) is that of testing remote sensing monitoring technologies for potential CO2 leaks. Work has been carried out in an area near the town of Latera in Lazio, Italy. This geothermal area, in a collapsed volcanic caldera, has long been known to have natural gas leaks and as such acts as a natural analogue to a leaking geological store of CO2. Since 2005 the indirect detection of CO2 via its effect on vegetation health has been studied using airborne multispectral and hyperspectral sensors in the visible, near and thermal infrared regions of the electromagnetic spectrum (Bateson, et al 2008). Methodologies developed have been extrapolated to the lower spatial resolution of satellite based sensors to investigate their use.

Pipeline routing and monitoring are well established remote sensing techniques but are normally aircraft and/or GPS-based. Pipeline monitoring can be accomplished using time-sequence aerial photography. Analysis of temporal change in the vicinity of the pipeline can provide information on nearby hazards such as landslides.

Terrain-motion

Many potential storage sites are depleted oil or gas reservoirs which implicitly have already been mapped in minute detail, the project concluded that monitoring applications were of most interest, and the most relevant of these was terrain-motion mapping using Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry, or InSAR for short. The rest of this article, therefore, focuses on applications of InSAR for CCS.

InSAR technology is already widely used in the oil and gas industry to measure the integrity and optimise the productivity of onshore reservoirs. Depending on target characteristics and the temporal distribution of SAR data used, relative accuracies of better than 1mm displacement can routinely be achieved. When this accuracy is combined with the wide-area coverage that characterises satellite EO, a unique and valuable tool is provided with many applications, one of which can be the monitoring of terrain-motions related to CCS life-cycle, e.g.

1. CCS site characterisation, i.e. tectonic setting: InSAR can represent a useful tool in the provision of synoptic maps of crustal deformation relating to tectonics, e.g. fault-mapping and dynamics, of obvious concern to those positioning permanent subterranean reservoirs of potentially hazardous gases.

2. Transportation, i.e. pipeline routing and integrity monitoring: Besides monitoring general terrain-deformation, the main use for InSAR in this area is landslide mapping where potential slides might mean a re-routing of a proposed new pipeline, or for the risk management of slopes carrying an existing infrastructure.

3. Analyses of plume migration as a surface expression: In some circumstances, InSAR can be used to map CO2 migration through the reservoir as an expression of surface terrain deformation.

4. CCS-injection-facility integrity monitoring: InSAR can be used to access the general, relative stability of a CCS pumping facility, e.g. effects of differential subsidence could lead to leaks and blowouts.

Note that appropriate SAR data availability for ongoing monitoring is assured by several different missions, not least ESA’s Sentinel 1a and 1b radar satellites, due for launch next year as part of Europe’s Global Monitoring for Environment and Security initiative (www.gmes.info), which will provide continuity to the invaluable SAR data archive already established since 1991.

Satellite InSAR

Since 1991, European Space Agency satellites (ERS-1, ERS-2 and Envisat) carrying Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) instruments have been consistently acquiring data across the world, establishing an archive of over 1.5 million images. These systems have since been augmented by a number of other SAR satellites operated by a other agencies (in particular the Canadian, German, Italian and Japanese space agencies), providing yet further opportunity for analyses. SAR images contain information about the position of the terrain at the time of image acquisition. As subsequent images are acquired over the same location they can be compared and used to map relative terrain-motion. This principal forms the basis of InSAR.

A range of InSAR techniques have been developed to extract optimal information from SAR imagery. Of particular importance for the CCS industry is a hybrid technique known as Persistent Scatterer InSAR (PSI). PSI allows relative sub-millimetric measurements to be made against individual, radar-reflective terrain-features that provide a persistent response in each SAR image. These ‘persistent scatterers’ (or ‘virtual GPS points’) generally correspond to parts of man-made structures, though they can also include bare rocks and outcrops. They act as persistent scatterers because of their serendipitous geometry, surface-roughness and electrical conductivity. The exact location of persistent scatterers cannot, therefore, be accurately predicted in advance of processing, but over urban areas their densities are usually measured in the hundreds per square kilometre (thousands with the latest high-resolution SAR imagery). The unique products derived from PSI include average annual motion maps and the motion history of individual scatterers, both covering the time-span of the dataset used, e.g. 1992 to the present day. The capability of PSI allows users to uniquely interrogate historical information (although PSI can also be used for up-to-date monitoring campaigns), an ability not possible with conventional surveying methods. The PSI technique was rigorously validated during a specific campaign over sites in the Netherlands during Stage 2 of the ESA Global Monitoring for Environment & Security (GMES) project Terrafirma, and is now widely used by dozens of national geoscience organisations across Europe.

The idea of using InSAR for the monitoring of CCS reservoirs first evolved from results obtained monitoring the inverse, i.e. gas and oil production where depletion of certain reservoirs cause a surface expression of subsidence. Such measurements proved to be of use to practitioners in understanding ‘compaction-drive’ and fluid dynamics. It was a natural progression to apply similar techniques to the reverse, to the injection of fluids into reservoirs, where the natural elasticity of the cap rock would heave in sympathy with increased reservoir pressure.

Case study: In Salah CCS Project, Algeria

In Salah is a world leading industrial scale CCS project located in central Algeria. The project, a joint venture initiative between BP, Sonatrach and Statoil, has been in operation since 2004. CO2 is separated from natural gas produced from three fields of Krechba, Reg, and Teguentour (Onumaa & Ohkawa 2008) and is re-injected into the Krechba Carboniferous Sandstone reservoir via three long (1,500m) horizontal wells at a depth of around 1,900m.

In 2005 a Joint Industry Project was set up to monitor the CO2 storage process using a variety of geochemical, geophysical and production techniques over an initial 5 year period (Mathieson, Midgely, Wright, Saoula & Ringrose 2010). InSAR has been used to better understand the impact of gas production and CO2 injection on the terrain, and provide a deeper understanding of reservoir characteristics.

Fugro NPA Ltd have carried out a proprietary study of the impact of In Salah production/storage activities on the regional terrain using PSI. The quantity of satellite SAR imagery archived and available across the Krechba field, as well as the local ground cover conditions (dry, vegetation-free rocky desert) were key prerequisites for the application of PSI to this area.

PSI was undertaken using 50 archived SAR images (acquired by ESA’s Envisat satellite), spanning a 7 year period (July 2003 to September 2010). High densities of measurement points, 406 per km2, were observed across the reservoir. PSI was successful in identifying four domains of terrain motion. Mapping these features against well locations highlights a correlation, along a northwest axis, with natural gas production (subsidence), enveloped to the north and east by three smaller domains of motion that relate to CO2 injection (heave). Subsidence rates along the axis KB-CA/CB/CC/CE approximate -2.9 mm/year, as opposed to +4.7mm/year at heave locations KB-501/502/503. The match between terrain deformation and evidence from subsurface data for the movement of CO2in the reservoir is intriguing. If PSI data can be calibrated against aspects of the injection dynamics, then the opportunity exists in certain circumstances for the remote monitoring of CO2 movement in the subsurface (Mathieson, Wright, Roberts & Ringrose 2008).

Elsewhere, PSI has been used to measure terrain heave associated with a gas storage facility located in the western region of Berlin, Germany. PSI was used to enhance measurements derived from ground levelling campaigns which, although highly accurate, only provide readings over a coarse network of measurements and are inherently time consuming and costly. PSI was integrated into the study with great success; movement correlated well with an increase in borehole head pressures resulting from gas injection. It was determined that PSI can be used effectively to monitor the initial phases of gas storage operations (Kuehn, Hoth, Stark, Burren & Hole 2009).

Conclusions

This article has provided a brief snapshot of the work done in a European Space Agency project looking at the potential for satellite EO technologies in application to CCS. A wide array of EO technologies were considered and although many might ultimately prove useful, the main potential is thought to be offered by satellite SAR interferometry where terrain-motion-measuring techniques can be applied to all stages of the CCS life-cycle. It is also clear, however, given the prevailing public scepticism and suspicions of CCS as a concept, particularly if sited onshore and near populations, that the current focus is more on public relations than the analysis of state-of-the-art monitoring technologies. It is good to know, though, that, if and when required, satellite EO can offer cost-effective, non-invasive tools that match the cutting-edge nature of CCS.

References

Mathieson, A., Midgely J., Wright I., Saoula N., Ringrose P. 2010. In Salah CO2 Storage JIP: CO2 sequestration monitoring and verification technologies applied at Krechba, Algeria. GHGT-10, Energy Procedia 00 (2010) 1063-00

Onumaa T. & Ohkawab S. 2008. Detection of surface deformation related with CO2 injection by DInSAR at In Salah, Algeria. GHGT-9, Energy Procedia 00 (2008) 000–000

Mathieson A., Wright I., Roberts D., Ringrose P. 2008. Satellite Imaging to Monitor CO2 Movement at Krechba, Algeria. GHGT-9, Energy Procedia 00 (2008) 000–000

Kuehn F., Hoth P., stark M., Burren R. & Hole J. 2009. Experience with Satellite Radar for Gas Storage Monitoring. Erdöl Erdgas Kohle 125. Jg. 2009, Heft 11

Authors

Adam Thomas and Ren Capes. PSI processing by Harry McCormack and Alex Fairbarns (Fugro NPA Ltd).
Fugro NPA
ESA

By Adam Thomas and Ren Capes,
CarbonCaptureJorunal

Probably no-one worries more about the practical effects of climate change and natural disasters than insurance company executives and, in particular, those in the reinsurance industry – the companies that insure the insurers. These managers need to base their policies and premiums on cogent analyses of risk but the information that underlies their decisions is often difficult to obtain or non-existent. In short, they lack “environmental intelligence”.

Carl Hedde, a senior executive with Munich Reinsurance’s American branch, outlined the state of play at a forum on creating a national strategy for environmental intelligence held in Washington DC, US, last week. Among his duties, Hedde chairs a group of 35 geoscientists who seek to anticipate factors such as the extent of insured losses resulting from hurricanes in the US each year.

The problem is getting worse, Hedde said, reciting a litany of disasters that have befallen the US alone already this year: blizzards in the north-east, floods in the mid-west, fires in the west, strong tornadoes in both usual and unusual areas. Munich Re maintains an enormous database on catastrophic losses to help spot trends and anomalies, explained Hedde. Over the last 40 years, North America has accounted for over half of insured losses due to natural disasters worldwide, according to company data. Eight of the 11 worst global disasters since 1950 occurred in North America, with Hurricane Katrina at the top of the list.

Hedde must estimate his company’s risk accumulation; that is, does it have the resources to cover its clients’ losses in worst-case scenarios? “One of our frustrations,” he said, “is that we need data to be able to convince the insurance departments that this” – the continuing upward trend of natural disasters as the climate warms – “is a phenomenon that is actually happening.”

Other speakers also emphasized the need for more environmental data than current satellites and ground-based stations provide. One of the problems in formulating policy, observed Richard Engel, is that responsibility for monitoring environmental change is diffused through many US government agencies, and no-one has overall responsibility for coordinating their observations. Engel heads the environmental and natural resources programme for the director of National Intelligence. He noted wryly that US intelligence agencies collect environmental information everywhere in the world, except in the US.

The contribution of the Landsat satellites to Earth observation since 1972 cannot be over-estimated, according to several participants in the forum. The six satellites that achieved orbit, two of which are still functioning, have provided millions of images related to worldwide land use. “Food-security issues facing us as a species are really unprecedented,” said Gerald Nelson of the International Food Policy Research Institute. Climate change is a “threat multiplier” to other causes of concern in this area. Since Landsat data became freely available in 2008, their use has been “exploding”, he said.

Yet despite Landsat and other satellites, we still know far too little even about basic land cover, Nelson said. “We need observations that occur year after year after year in the same place,” he continued. And they need to be at relevant resolution. For example, in Java, Indonesia, “you will find fields that are the size of five metres by five metres”. Nelson urged that future Earth-observation satellites be inexpensive (“forget the gold plating”), and use off-the-shelf technology and simple but reliable launch vehicles. He suggested that a near-ideal system could be produced for €150 m, backed by ground-based GPS units, possibly within cell phones.

The forum was sponsored by the Alliance for Earth Observations, comprising US government agencies, academic institutions, industrial corporations and non-profit organizations.

Source

Chelmsford, England—Imaging solutions company e2v signed two contracts with Thales Alenia Space worth a total of more than $5.7 million dollars ($4 million euro). The contracts are for the supply of imaging sensors—space-qualified back-thinned CCD sensors with high quantum efficiency (QE) and excellent modulation transfer function (MTF) performance—that will equip the high-resolution optical imaging instruments for Thales Alenia Space Earth observation satellites Göktürk and Seosat-Ingenio.

Göktürk is an Earth observation satellite system for the Turkish Ministry of Defence. It is derived from the Proteus platform (also developed by Thales Alenia Space) and will include a high-resolution optical instrument, similar to that used in the Pleiades program. The satellite launch is planned for 2013.

Seosat-Ingenio is the first Spanish Earth observation satellite and the first to be built by a consortium of industries from the Spanish space sector primed by Astrium. This Spanish Earth observation satellite system will meet a growing need for data and provide Spain with full autonomy and independence in image capture for applications such as security land management, natural resource management, and to help with the response to natural catastrophes.

The sensors will be delivered over a 2 year period starting in July 2011.

Bertrand De Monte, Marketing Manager of high performance imaging, at e2v said, “e2v is delighted to sign this contract with Thales Alenia Space. It demonstrates how e2v’s imaging solutions for Earth observation applications are well respected and add to more than 20 worldwide programmes running with our high performance imaging technology.”

SOURCE: e2v

Posted by: Gail Overton

Annual EU budgets shall comply with the multiannual financial framework laid down in a unanimously adopted Council Regulation with a consent of the European Parliament.

On the evening of Wednesday 29 June 2011, the European Commission presented its proposal for the next Multi-Financial Framework (2014 – 2015). This proposal will serve as a basis for the negotiations that are going to take place in the months to come in view of the adoption of the final Multi-Financial Framework.

Within this document, the GMES programme is dealt with in section 5.8.2 “Large scale projects”. In this section, the Commission proposes to foresee the funding of the GMES programme outside the multiannual financial framework after 2014.
This is also reflected in the summary table provided on page 6 of the Commission’s proposal, where GMES appears outside the multiannual financial framework, with a total budget of 5841 Million Euros over the entire period (which represents 834 Million Euros per year).

The entire proposal can be downloaded from the Europa website at the following address EC-EUROPA

Source GMES.Info

The European Commission on June 29 fired the opening shots in what will be a protracted battle over the European Union’s budget for 2014-20, proposing an increase of 5.04% compared to 2007-13.
Commission President José Manuel Barroso presented the proposal for the Multiannual Financing Framework (MFF) to the European Parliament’s political leadership last night, after securing agreement among the European commissioners in the afternoon.
The proposal appears to cut the size of the budget, measured as a proportion of the EU’s wealth, reducing it from 1.11% of gross national income (GNI) in 2007-13 to 1.05% in 2014-20.
But the Commission is also proposing to move some big-ticket spending items outside the MFF, to be funded separately. If those items were included in the count, it would constitute an increase of 11% on the 2007-13 spending, and the budget as a proportion of GNI would remain at 1.11%.
Barroso said: “We are proposing an ambitious and at the same time responsible budget.” He said it was both realistic and innovative. People should “look beyond the headline figures to see how we will deliver growth and jobs”, he said.
The headline figures are that appropriations for commitments would increase to €1,025 billion from €975.77bn in 2007-13 (up 5.04%), and appropriations for payments would increase to €971.5bn from €925bn in 2007-13.
The proposal does not meet demands made by France, Germany, the Netherlands, Finland and the UK in December that any increase in spending should be limited to the rate of inflation. Hungary and Poland have been prominent among the central European states demanding a more generous EU budget.
The European Parliament, whose consent is needed for any budget settlement, had called for a 5% increase from the current funding period.
The Commission is proposing shifts in spending between some policy areas, with €50bn devoted to energy, transport and information-technology infrastructure.
The proportion of the budget devoted to the Common Agricultural Policy and fisheries support would be reduced from 41% to 37%, while that for cohesion policy – regional aid and other structural funds – would increase slightly, from 36% to 37%. The budget for external policies will be increased from €56bn to €70bn.
The Commission is proposing to move outside the EU budget €2.7bn of funding for ITER, a nuclear fusion reactor project, and €5.8bn for the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES), an EU-European Space Agency project to use satellites to gather scientific data about the earth. The emergency aid reserve, (€2.45bn), the European globalisation fund (€3bn), the solidarity fund (€7bn), a flexibility instrument of €3.5bn and a €3.5bn reserve for crises in the agricultural sector are also placed outside the MFF.
The proposal on the MFF was accompanied by a proposal on reforms to EU staff pay, pensions and benefits. The Commission is proposing to cut the number of staff working in all EU institutions by 5% by 2018.
Pierre-Philippe Bacri, president of the federation of European civil servants (FFPE), a staff union, said: “It’s completely the wrong response.”
Klaus-Heiner Lehne, a German centre-right MEP who chairs the European Parliament’s legal affairs committee, welcomed the proposed cutbacks. “The EU requests more efficiency and savings from member states and hereby gives a good example itself,” he said.
The Commission has retreated slightly from its widely trailed support for funding part of the EU budget with an EU-wide tax on financial transactions. The proposal now talks of a “financial sector tax”.
The Commission proposes a simplification of the rebates given to some member states on the contributions that they make to the EU budget. The most contentious rebate is the UK’s, while Germany, Austria, Sweden and the Netherland are given a rebate on their contribution to the British rebate.

REACTION
A spokesman for David Cameron, the UK’s prime minister, said: “The EU budget increase that the Commission has proposed today is unrealistic. Britain and the EU’s other largest payers made it clear in December that the EU budget should be frozen, and we will stick to that. The EU has to take the same tough measures as national governments are taking across Europe to tackle public deficits. That means a restrained EU budget focused on the things that will get our economy growing.”
“Britain will also oppose new EU taxes which will introduce additional burdens for business and damage EU competitiveness. And we will continue to protect the rebate – without it, the UK’s net contribution as a percentage of national income would be the largest across the EU, twice as large as France’s and Italy’s, and almost one-and-a-half times bigger than Germany’s.”
Jerzy Buzek, the European Parliament president, said: “The Commission’s proposal on the long-term budget for the EU is an intelligent starting point for negotiations. The next MFF will be one of the most important in the EU’s history. It will set the direction for the Union at an exceptional time when the European project is under pressure from the sovereign-debt crisis and from external instability.
“A system of real own resources would be fairer, more transparent, simpler and equitable. We should also see an end to rebates, exceptions and correction mechanisms that have accumulated within the current system.”
Alain Lamassoure, chairman of the European Parliament’s budgets committee, said: “I am glad to see that the Commission’s proposals reflect the main priorities of the European Parliament: spend better where Europe is necessary to save money elsewhere. And, above all, finding new, modern and European sources of income so that the national contributions can be lowered.”
Lamassoure added that “a debate of such importance should not be held in the secrecy of ministerial meetings behind closed doors. This should become the subject of as wide a public debate as possible, including a conference with full involvement of national parliaments. In the coming days we will make an effort toward realising this.”
© 2011 European Voice