Last week, Member States of the European Space Agency ESA decided a new biomass satellite to become the seventh Earth Explorer mission, being launched in 2020.
The mission addresses the status and dynamics of tropical forests. Its primary scientific objectives are to determine the distribution of above-ground biomass in these forests and to measure annual changes in this stock over the period of the mission. Studying this is key to our understanding of Earth’s climate.
The amount of biomass and forest height will be measured at a resolution of 200 m, and forest disturbances such as clear-cutting at a resolution of 50 m, providing an important tool for sustainable forest management. The data can also be used for monitoring the ionosphere, glaciers and ice sheets, and for mapping subsurface geology in deserts and surface topography below dense vegetation.
