Satellite Earth Observation missions and data analysis are critical elements of each segment of the Earth Observation value chain. New datasets and observations lead to new knowledge of physical, chemical, and biological processes of the Earth system. When used to improve Canadian Earth System models, environmental prediction and climate projection services to Canadians are made better, more accurate and robust. For over two decades, the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) has funded EO missions and scientific research to advance satellite and instrument operations, data product development and validation, and data analysis. This presentation will focus on current CSA supported missions, their new data products and validation, recent scientific advances they have enabled, along with new research results from satellite data analysis projects. The talk will also highlight academic-government collaborations, the Earth system models they advance, and international collaborations enabled.

Landsat satellites have been providing continuous monitoring of the Earth’s surface since 1972. The US Geological Survey (USGS) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) entered into an interagency agreement for Sustainable Land Imaging (SLI) to continue the Landsat quality global survey missions and 50 years of Landsat data record. Landsat 9 is the first SLI mission, which was successfully launched on September 27th, 2021 from the Vandenberg Space Force Base. Landsat 8 and 9 together will provide the best quality Landsat observations yet from space to support food security, monitor water use, assess wildfire impacts and recovery, monitor forest health, track urban growth, support climate resiliency and grow the economy. Planning for the Landsat 9 follow-on mission, Landsat Next, is already underway. The USGS National Land Imaging Program has collected land imaging user needs from a range of applications across the Federal civil community and other stakeholders to help define Landsat Next science objectives and requirements. User community has expressed great interests in maintaining Landsat continuity, supporting synergy with Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission and enabling new emerging applications that are critical to tackle the challenges in today’s global environment. Landsat Next draft science requirements have included improvements in spatial resolution, temporal revisit and spectral capability while maintaining science data quality to continue serving the global land imaging community. This presentation will provide an overview of the SLI user needs process, Landsat Next draft science requirements and Landsat Next mission status.

The NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission will use synthetic aperture radar to map Earth’s surface every 12 days, persistently on ascending and descending portions of the orbit, over all land and ice-covered surfaces. The mission’s primary objectives will be to study Earth land and ice deformation, and ecosystems, in areas of common interest to the US and Indian science communities. This single observatory solution with an L-band (24 cm wavelength) and S-band (10 cm wavelength) radar has a swath of over 240 km at fine resolution, and will operate primarily in a dual-polarimetric mode in an exact repeat orbit.

NISAR will characterize long-term and local surface deformation on active faults, volcanoes, potential and extant landslides, subsidence and uplift associated with changes in aquifers and subsurface hydrocarbon reservoirs, and other deforming surfaces. These measurements will be used to model the physics of the subsurface, potential hazards associated with the deformation, and associated risks. The variable and largely unpredictable nature of these phenomena lead to a systematic collection strategy to capture as many signals as possible. Surface deformation measurements will be validated over globally distributed GPS networks in a variety of environmental settings.

NISAR will determine changes in carbon storage and uptake resulting from disturbance and subsequent regrowth of global woody vegetation, by regularly measuring the amount of woody biomass and its change in the most dynamic regions of the world. NISAR also has objectives in characterizing changes in the extent of active crops to aid in crop assessments and forecasting, as well as changes in wetlands extent, freeze/thaw state and permafrost degradation. The ecosystems data sets will be validated through in situ measurements at dozens of sites around the world in partnership with other missions and organizations.

NISAR will investigate the nature and causes of changes to Earth’s ice sheets and sea ice cover in relation to the atmospheric and ocean forces that act upon them, through systematic deformation measurements of Greenland’s and Antarctica’s ice sheets, seasonal dynamics of highly mobile and variable sea ice, and inventory the variability of key mountain glaciers which are retreating in many places at a record pace. Validation of deformation on the ice sheets will employ bare-rock references and cross-over analysis, as well as some deployed GPS stations on the flowing ice. The sea ice community will compare sea ice motion to in situ buoy data.

In addition, NISAR will be operated to observe potential hazards and disasters on a best-efforts basis to demonstrate rapid assessments in urgent events such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, and severe storms. These data will support research into effective rescue and recovery activities, system integrity, lifelines, levee stability, urban infrastructure, and environment quality. The mission team has implemented an urgent-response tasking system that will combine automated triggers for earthquakes, volcanoes, and fires with manual requests by certified users.

The joint science team at NASA and ISRO has created a stable, joint science and observation plan, robust calibration and validation plan. The team also has defined a suite of science products, including raw data, complex images at full resolution in both natural radar coordinates and in an orthorectified form, and lower resolution polarimetric and interferometric products also in radar and ortho-rectified coordinates. These products will be organized in frames roughly 240 km x 240 km in size, and will be available at the Alaska Satellite Facility Distributed Active Archive Center under NASA’s full and open data policy.

The science team has developed the observation plan prioritizing continuity of time series measurements. To that end, the polar measurements prioritize the South Pole, creating a coverage gap north of 77.5 degrees of latitude, due to the inclined orbit and consistent southward off-nadir pointing of the radars. The radar instruments have many possible modes, operated at L-band globally, and jointly with S-band regionally over India and select other locations around the world. The NISAR science observation plan is designed to tackle the science questions posed by persistent and consistent imaging of Earth’s land and ice surfaces throughout the life of the mission, delivering time series of approximately 30 images per year from ascending and descending vantage points.

The cadence of science operations is expected to be highly routine. The initial observation plan will be in place pre-launch, and it is anticipated that there will only be minor adjustments to the plan once in orbit. The project has defined a six-month replanning cycle, whereby scientists identify changes they would like to see based on the data previously acquired and analyzed science data, the science and project mission planning teams evaluate the impact of those changes on resources and the ability to meet science requirements, and if acceptable, the observation plan is revised. Each of these steps is allocated roughly 2 months. Given that the goal of NISAR is to create regular, easy-to-use, time series of Earth change, the project expects that any adopted changes will not break the time series.

The science team is developing algorithms to produce higher level products for validation purposes. These products will be over local or regional validation sites, with sufficient to demonstrate that the required accuracies can be achieved over the Earth. The algorithms for producing these products will be made available to scientists interested in using NISAR data. They are being developed in the form of jupyter notebooks, serving the purpose of processing, algorithmic description and documentation, and instruction. Sample data sets will be available prior to launch to prepare the community for the data products and the algorithmic workflows to produce higher level products.

NISAR is in its third phase of integration and test, when all the components of the instrument payload, including the L- and S-band radar electronics, the solid-state recorder, GPS, and engineering payload, and the mechanical boom and reflector systems are assembled and tested in environments at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This completed payload will be subsequently shipped to India for the final phase of integration, test and launch, currently planned for 2023. The mission systems have been built and are in extended operational testing.

With NOAA’s current Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites – R Series (GOES-R) satellites slated to end their operational service in the mid-2030s, attention has turned to planning NOAA’s next generation system, the Geostationary Extended Observations (GeoXO) series.

Pre-formulation activities for GeoXO were conducted over 2020-2021 and included a wide-ranging assessment of user needs via workshops, conferences, outreach events, and surveys; the evaluation and prioritization of potential observational choices versus NOAA mission service areas; documentation of the societal benefits for each observation; industry studies of instruments and architecture concepts; and government-led instrument and constellation studies. The pre-formulation phase resulted in the definition of observational requirements for this new system. GeoXO will continue the GOES-R-legacy observations of visible/infrared imagery and lightning mapping that are critical for tracking real-time environmental conditions. In addition, GeoXO will provide new observations to improve weather forecasting including hyperspectral sounding, to aid numerical weather prediction and nowcasting, and potentially low light imagery, for tracking clouds and smoke at night. GeoXO will also meet new needs for ocean, coast, and atmospheric monitoring with ocean color imagery and atmospheric composition sensing. Architecture trades were conducted in order to select a GeoXO constellation and the program completed a Mission Concept Review in June 2021.

The planned GeoXO constellation will include twin “east” and “west” satellites with the Imager, Lightning Mapper, and Ocean Color instruments, and a third “center” satellite carrying the Sounder and Atmospheric Composition instrument. The program was officially approved to begin formulation activities in November 2021. Phase A industry studies for the Imager and Sounder instruments are underway and studies for the other instruments and spacecraft are planned to begin in 2022. The first GeoXO launch is targeted for 2032 and the satellites are expected to be operational into the 2050s.

This presentation will discuss the GeoXO program scope, requirements, mission architecture, status, and timeline, along with the plans for program formulation, slated to continue through 2025.

A set of observing system simulation experiments (OSSEs) was preformed to investigate the impact of assimilating geostationary hyperspectral infrared sounder and microwave observations into the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office (GMAO) OSSE system. OSSEs and several other tools in this work is intended to help inform NOAA’s Geostationary Extended Observations (GeoXO) program to assess the potential gains from various configurations of geostationary infrared (IR) and microwave sounders from a numerical weather prediction perspective using a global system. Infrared sounder configurations consider systems with longwave thermal infrared-only and short-to-midwave infrared-only spectral coverage. Scenarios with two sounders at 75 degrees and 135 degrees West longitude and one sounder at 105-degree West longitude are also assessed along with other IR GEO sounders positioned around the Earth. The microwave sounder simulation is run in a similar configuration as the experiment with two infrared sounders, but several channels in the 60, 165, and 183 GHz frequency regions are used instead. A summary of progress and results will be presented.

The PACE mission represents NASA’s next great investment in ocean biology, clouds, and aerosol data records to enable advanced insight into ocean and atmospheric responses to Earth’s changing climate. Scheduled for launch in January 2024, PACE will not only extend key heritage essential climate variable time-series, but also enable the accurate estimation of a wide range of novel ocean, land, and atmosphere geophysical variables. A key aspect of PACE is its inclusion of an advanced hyperspectral scanning radiometer known as the Ocean Color Instrument (OCI) to measure the “colors” of the ocean, land, and atmosphere. Whereas heritage instruments observe roughly five to ten visible wavelengths from blue to red, OCI will collect a continuum of colors that span the visible rainbow from the ultraviolet to near infrared and beyond. Specifically, OCI is a scanning spectrometer that spans the ultraviolet to near-infrared region in 2.5 nm steps and also includes seven discrete shortwave infrared bands from 940 to 2260 nm, all with 1 km2 nadir ground sample distances and 1-2 day global coverage. This leap in technology will enable improved understanding of aquatic ecosystems and biogeochemistry, as well as provide new information on phytoplankton community composition and improved detection of algal blooms. OCI will also continue and advance many atmospheric aerosol, cloud, and land capabilities from heritage satellite instrumentation, which in combination with its ocean measurements, will enable improved assessment of atmospheric and terrestrial impacts on ocean biology and chemistry. The PACE payload will be complemented by two small multi-angle polarimeters (MAP) with spectral ranges that span the visible to near infrared spectral region, both of which will significantly improve aerosol and hydrosol characterizations and provide opportunities for novel ocean color atmospheric correction. The first MAP, the University of Maryland Baltimore County HARP2 instrument, will provide wide-swath multispectral polarimetric retrievals at 10-60 view angles. The second MAP, the SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research and Airbus Defence and Space Netherlands SPEXone instrument, will provide narrow-swath hyperspectral polarimetric retrievals at 5 view angles. Ultimately, the PACE instrument suite will revolutionize studies of global biogeochemistry, carbon cycles, and hydrosols / aerosols in the ocean-atmosphere system and, in general, shed new light on our colorful home planet. This presentation will showcase the current status of the PACE mission, with a focus on instrument characteristics, core and advanced data products and their access, community engagement and potentials for new synergies and collaborations, and other mission plans as PACE heads towards its launch.