Sweden

Sweden has signed an agreement with the European Space Agency (ESA) on the management and access to data provided by Sentinel satellites, called "Understanding for the Sentinel Collaborative Ground Segment Cooperation", which aims to facilitate Sentinel data exploitation in the Nordic country.

According to the arrangement, the Swedish National Space Board (SNSB) will coordinate ground based activities in Sweden and act as a representative between ESA and national initiatives. The Scandinavian country is the eighth country to sign up for Sentinel data after Greece, Norway, Italy, Finland, Germany, France and the UK.

Sentinel satellites are developed to take part in Copernicus, the European Earth Observation Programme of the European Commission. Sentinel 1A was launched in April 2014 and offers all weather, day and night imagery for land and ocean services. Sentinel 2A is scheduled for June 23th and will provide high resolution images with data being used to…

Sweden is not a country typically known for its summer wildfires. Fires occur regularly, but not in the intesity of this year's blaze that has been affecting the region of Västmanland since 31 July 2014.

The fire grew to the largest one in 40 years. It has affected more than 150 square kilometers, killed one person and forced thousands to evacuate.

NASA's Operational Land Imager (OLI) onboard the Landsat 8 satellite captured an image of the fires from Space. On the natural color image, burnt areas appear brown while unaffected areas are dark green, light green or tan. 

OLI measures in the visible, near infrared, and short wave infrared portions of the spectrum. Its images have 15-meter (49 ft.) panchromatic and 30-meter multi-spectral spatial resolutions along a 185 km (115 miles) wide swath.

Yesterday the 2013 World Water Week was launched in Stockholm, Sweden, an international event, organised by the Stockholm International Water Institute. The theme for this year's Week taking place between 1 and 6 September 2013 is “Water Cooperation: Building Partnerships”. Throughout the week, participants will have the opportunity to engage with leaders from government, business, academia and members from nearly 250 convening organisations.The thematic scope of the 2013 World Water Week in Stockholm is formulated from the perspective of the “what’s” and who’s”; in the course of workshops, seminars and other events the “how” questions will be central. Each workshop will also review the progress made in water cooperation.

Some sessions will also look at the use of space-based information in the context of water. A session organized by NASA and the World Resources Institute (WRI) will highlight the use of advanced…