Remote Sensations
by Michael Engel
The world is beautiful - sometimes especially from above! Because every now and then, a view from afar enables us to better understand the big picture on the ground. So it's not just the beauty of the colors or patterns of the images that motivates us to do our work in remote sensing. Sometimes it is also the beauty of the earth system itself that amazes us: whether it is the "breathing" of vegetation as the seasons change, the glow of sediment-soaked fjords or the sparkle of snow-covered mountain peaks; but also the burning of the forest, the flooding of the desert or anthropogenic destruction. Because at some point, people realize that all these things have one thing in common: they are part of this world. And both positively and negatively, they play a decisive role in the system they form.
To indulge this passion of ours, we depend above all on two satellite programs that have been providing a great service to society for decades now: the Landsat missions of the United States of America and the Copernicus program of the European Union. They make it possible to study the Earth system from space in an unprecedented way. The sheer volume of data processed by institutions such as the ESA, USGS, NASA and many others (including us) should be emphasized at this point: the Sentinel-2 satellite mission alone delivers around 4 petabytes of new data every year - that's around 11 terabytes a day!
With Remote Sensations, we would like to introduce our work to the general public in an informal way (yes, we also link to Wikipedia articles) and hope to inspire one or two people for our field! Of course, we have done our best, but please note that the products provided or shown here do not claim to be complete or correct, as this is not our core scientific work. Nevertheless, we hope users and interested parties have fun, because: "The world is beautiful!" - and this sentence probably sums up Remote Sensations best!
Best
Michael Engel
