The University of Valencia gathers in Torrent more than 200 world experts in Earth Observation to assess the health of the planet

Deforestation, heat islands in cities, soil erosion, crop tracking, water consumption, fires, changes in vegetation, temperature analysis or sea level rise are aspects of constant study by the scientific community and fundamental issues to assess the health of a planet deeply affected by climate change.

All these issues will be discussed for five days at the 6^th International Symposium on Recent Advances in Quantitative Remote Sensing, which will bring together more than 200 remote sensing specialists, including institutional representatives and representatives of the most important scientific and space agencies in the world, such as NASA or the European Space Agency (ESA).

With a program designed to share the most recent advances in remote sensing and present the missions that the main research organisations plan to launch in the future, the symposium aims to improve understanding of the phenomena that occur on the Earth’s surface, in the atmosphere and in the oceans, with a view to developing possible solutions for the future. For this, more than 180 works from China, USA, France, Germany, Italy, Holland, UK, Chile, Poland, Morocco, Luxembourg, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Denmark, Israel, Brazil, Portugal, and Spain will be put on the table.

Among the participants, the presence of relevant scientists and institutional representatives and public and private organisations stands out. This is the case of Mark Drinkwater, head of the space missions’ section of the European Space Agency, who will speak about ESA’s future projects in this field, as well as the importance of having accurate environmental information that contributes to the understanding of climate changes on the planet. Or Robert O. Green (NASA, JPL, Pasadena, USA), who will present his EMIT spectrometer, launched last July and installed on the International Space Station in order to investigate the impact of mineral dust particles about the temperature of the Earth. The representative of the European Commission, Martin Claverie, will speak about satellite crop monitoring. The Global Change Unit of the University of Valencia will present its new methodology to assess the severity of forest fires with data from sentinel-2; and, among many other issues, the Institute of Aerospace Technology will show the results of the exploitation of the PAZ mission, a Spanish high-resolution radar launched into space in 2018. The full program can be accessed on the IPL website.

Organised by the Global Change Unit of the Image Processing Laboratory (IPL) of the University of Valencia, the conference has the support of ESA, NASA, CNES of France, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Agricultural Sciences.