Brockmann Consult: News

09.-10.05.2013 Presentation of recent results of the CoastColour and SeaSWIR projects at the upcoming CoastColour and SeaSWIR User Consultation Meeting.

The meeting co-organised by Brockmann Consult and belspo takes place from 09th – 10th May, 2013 at the EUMETSAT premises in Darmstadt.

The recent results of the CoastColour and SeaSWIR projects will be communicated to the scientific and broader coastal user community. Feedback from coastal scientists, managers and other stakeholder will be gathered, and future possibilities with the upcoming Sentinels will be discussed. Recommendations for further scientific work, requirements for new sensors and for exploitation of Earth Observation data for coastal zones will be formulated. These will be addressed to the Space Agencies and research funding organisations.
Source: EUMETSAT

January 2013

16.-17.01.2013 Lake Water Monitoring Service - Freshmon Annual Review successfully conducted.

BC's service line for water quality products of inland waters is further developed in the European R&D Freshmon.
Reviewers of the EU Research Executive Agency and the Freshmon team met for two days in Munich for the second annual review. The project passed successfully this important milestone and is entering now into its final stage before operationalisation.

December 2012

06.12.2012 Celebrating BEAM's 10th Birthday.

Today we're celebrating the 10th birthday of BEAM! The first version was released on the 6th of December 2002. Since that time, our user community has grown steadily and we have got a lot of valuable contributions and useful feedback that helped us making BEAM what it is today. The BEAM project team is looking forward to continue updating, improving and maintaining the software. Big thanks to ESA and all contributors for supporting BEAM!
The BEAM Development Team.

November 2012

02.11.2012 SMOS – 3 years in orbit!

After 3 years of in-orbit experience SMOS has successfully demonstrated the application of aperture synthesis to Earth Observation, a milestone in remote sensing. Since May 2010 the SMOS mission has been in routine operations, providing very reliable instrument operations, data processing and dissemination to users.

All acquired data are made available to a continuously growing science community by the SMOS-Data-Distribution service operated by Brockmann Consult. This service includes the reception of all SMOS mission data including all acquisitions and all auxiliary data (~ 1TB per month), the basic quality control, the subsetting according to a pre-defined list of sites per user, and the distribution via ftp (~ 3.5 TB per month). Since its launch - on 2nd November 2009 - all in all more than 600,000 files with a volume of nearly 25 TB have been uploaded by ESA. The acquired files have been subsetted according to the needs of the users. These users downloaded more than 4.3 Million files with a volume of more than 110 TB.

Thanks to its excellent technical status, SMOS will of course continue to operate and provide valuable data to the science community.

September 2012

29.09.2012 ESA Climate Change Initiative successfully passes the Mid Term Review.

Brockmann Consult is contributing to the System Engineering and Earth Observation team of the Climate Change Initiative, a 75M€ programme of the European Space Agency. On 27.09.2012 the first results of the programme were presented to the delegates of the ESA members states during the Mid Term Review. Having successfully passed this important milestone the programme will enter into its second phase in 2013.
The Brockmann Consult Software and Earth Observation experts are working in three out of the 13 projects of the programme, namely the Land Cover CCI, Ocean Colour CCI and Sea Surface Temperature CCI. Dr. Carsten Brockmann participated in the review by representing the industrial software engineering teams.

July 2012

22.-27.07.2012 Presentation of Calvalus, CoastColour, BEAM and Land Cover CCI at IGARSS in Munich.

The 32nd annual IGARSS symposium takes place from 22.-27. July 2012 in Munich. Here the excellent tradition of gathering world-class scientists, engineers and educators engaged in the fields of geoscience and remote sensing will be continued. This year, IGARSS' theme is "Remote Sensing for a Dynamic Earth". Brockmann Consults is presenting the Land Cover CCI project, the CoastColour Dataset and Calvalus, the system for agile processing of large amount of earth observation data. On Friday, 27.7. the application of Brockmann's EO toolbox BEAM for educational purpose will be demonstrated. Leoworks 4, the ESA educational toolbox which is built using the BEAM API, can be seen in action at the DLR School Lab stand.

May 2012

20-22.05.2012 BC presents Water Quality Services on the European Maritime Day 2012 in Gothenburg, Sweden.

About 1.000 participants are attending this event and BC is presenting Remote Sensing Techniques - Products and Software - and the European Water Quality Services developed and provided within the framework of Marcoast, Aquamar and Freshmon.

09.05.2012 ESA declares end of mission for Envisat.

The end of the Envisat satellite operations is being declared. The investigation team will nevertheless continue attempts to re-establish contact while considering failure scenarios for the next two months.

April 2012

19-20.04.2012 Investigation on Envisat continues.

ESA is working on the re-esablishing of the contact with ENVISAT and is investigating the problem. BC is is putting effort on the replacement of ENVISAT data sources with alternatives.
ESA News: https://earth.esa.int/web/guest/missions/esa-operational-eo-missions/envisat/news

Further information: http://www.esa.int/esaEO/SEM2HNKWZ0H_index_0.html

12.04.2012 Envisat services interrupted.

After 10 years of service, Envisat has stopped sending data to Earth. ESA's mission control is working to re-establish contact with the satellite. Although this mission has been in orbit twice as long as it was designed for, ESA hopes to keep the satellite in service until the launch of the successor Sentinel missions. The first sign that there was a problem came on 08 April when contact with the satellite was unexpectedly lost, preventing the reception of any data as it passed over the Kiruna ground station in Sweden.
ESA News: https://earth.esa.int/web/guest/missions/esa-operational-eo-missions/envisat

Further information: http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMQ2EHWP0H_index_0.html

February 2012

15.02.2012 Data managment support to Department of Urban Development and Environment of Hamburg.

BC is providing the transformation and allocation of monitoring data from Wadden Sea National Park of Hamburg (Department of Urban Development of Hamburg) for the Trilateral Monitoring and Assessment Program (TMAP). This data will be made available to the public through the Common Wadden Sea Secretariat (CWSS), Wilhelmshaven, Germany.

January 2012

25.26.01.2012 Brockmann Consult GmbH at WISER Final Conference.

The WISER final conference took place on the 25-26 January 2012 in Tallinn, Estonia. This EU-funded project focussed on developing methods for assessing the status of aquatic ecosystems and recovery measures in line with the European Water Framework Directive. Brockmann Consult presented a poster about the 'Application of Remote Sensing for European Directives' to show how remote sensing data could be used as an additional tool for Water quality monitoring and assessment.

November 2011

14.11.2011 Calvalus - An efficient processing system for cal/val and algorithm development is now available.

Brockmann Consult successfully completed the ESA Calvalus project - A demonstration system which performs efficient bulk processing of large amounts of satellite data. Calvalus aims at supporting Earth Observation cal/val activities and algorithm development by providing fast access to mission-wide satellite data and a highly configurable processing environment. The Calvalus system utilises Apache Hadoop and the ESA BEAM development platform and achieves its enhanced performance from the massive parallelisation and data-local execution of processing tasks.

July 2011

20.07.2011 BEAM is mentor at ESA SOCIS: Apply now!

ESA Summer of Code in Space (SOCIS) is a pilot program run by the Advanced Concepts Team of the European Space Agency that offers student developers stipends to write code for various space-related open source software projects.

Through SOCIS, accepted student applicants are paired with a mentor or mentors from the participating projects, thus gaining exposure to real-world software development scenarios. In turn, the participating projects are able to more easily identify and bring in new developers.

BEAM has been accepted as a mentoring organization by ESA. Students can now apply for suggested ideas, through the SOCIS Webpage, until 27th of July. For a list of suggested ideas see the SOCIS Ideas Page.

May 2011

12.05.2011 BEAM 4.9 is now available.

The new BEAM 4.9 release comes with a new Envisat MERIS data processor, named 'Radiometry Correction'. It combines a Smile-effect correction, an equalisation, a radiance-to-reflectance conversion and a new radiometric re-calibration. For exporting pixels from a bunch of data products a new tool has been introduced. Another 4.9 feature is that files can now be dragged from the file explorer onto the VISAT products view in order to open them.

For a complete list of changes please see the issue summary.

The installer for BEAM 4.9 can be downloaded from the BEAM download page.

March 2011

31.03.2011 Spring Bloom in the Kattegat and western Baltic Sea.

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This year's spring bloom in the Kattegat and western Baltic Sea can be clearly detected with satellite data (here: MERIS sensor onboard ENVISAT satellite). Chlorophyll concentrations and extent of the spring bloom can be seen here.

17.03.2011 Brockmann Consult to be presented on the ESA-MOST dragon cooperation programme.

BC runs the BEAM training as a part of the "Advance Training Cource in Ocean Remote Sensing" in the State Key Laboratory of Estuarine and Coastal Research, East China Normal University, Shanghai, P.R. China Within the framework of the ESA-MOST dragon cooperation programme.

08.03.2011 MERIS Validation Team meetings; BC presented the CoastColour project (C. Brockmann) and the Marcoast Validation Bureau (U. Lange).

February 2011

03.02.2011 ESOV-NG 2.0 released.

The version 2.0 of the ESOV NG application has been released and it can be downloaded from the Esov distribution web site.

ESOV NG allows users to visualize and print Instrument swaths, Ground tracks, Zone coverages, Ground Station Visibility and to generate overpass table for generic Earth Observation LEO satellites. Support for Envisat, ERS-1, ERS-2, Cryosat, ADM, SMOS, Metop is built in, more satellites can be added easily.

December 2010

7.12.2010 The 'Monitoring of Water Quality for Lakes' Project Kick-off Meeting

Brockmann Consult is preparing a next generation of Water Quality Products for Lakes and freshwater reservoirs in Europe. On 7.12.2010 the European Research Project FRESHMON (FP7 Space Call) will be kicked-off. The project is lead by EOMAP GmbH and comprises 5 partners from 4 European countries. The objective of the project is to develop a new service-line for the continuous provision of Earth Observation based products, integrated with in situ and hydrodynamic modelling components, for water quality monitoring.

November 2010

2-3.11.2010 VAE Intertidal User Workshop.

A 2-days User Workshop has been hold in Lisbon in order to demonstrate the outcome of the ESA VAE Project "Monitoring of Intertidal Flats".
30 participants from 3 different countries attended the workshop.

September 2010

16.09.2010 New MERIS L1 processor and updates for BEAM 4.8.

The MERIS L1 Equalization processor, a new processor for MERIS Level 1 data products, is now available. It performs a radiometric equalization of the MERIS L1b products. It reduces detector-to-detector and camera-to-camera systematic radiometric differences and results into a diminution of the vertical stripping observed on MERIS L1b products.

Additionally, several modules of BEAM have been updated.The changes are listed in the issue summary.

August 2010

16.09.2010 German online magazine Golem.de refers to CalVal Portal.

July 2010

31.07.2010 New BEAM 4.8, GlobToolbox 2.0, SMOS-Box 2.1, CHRIS-Box 1.5.2, and EPR-API 2.2 have been released.

In the BEAM 4.8 release we have added a number of new readers to enable BEAM to work with even more remote sensing products. In particular we have added readers for products originating from the SPOT VEGETATION programme, for Landsat TM products in GeoTIFF format, for HDF-EOS gridded products, and a reader for generic NetCDF/CF-products. BEAM 4.8 also allows to export products to the widely used data format NetCDF/CF. As another feature it is now possible to apply "auto-grouping" in the product tree; that is, product nodes whose names start with the same character sequence are automatically put into a common group.

GlobToolbox 2.0 extends the first version of the GlobToolbox by a number of tools tackling the time dimension. First of all, a time series manager allows to define and edit time series. A time series player allows vividly visualising a time series by providing the control elements for navigating through a time series, either manually or automatically. And a time series graph has been developed which may be used to compare values of different measures, such as TSM or SST, for a specified time series. Apart from time series, the GlobToolbox 2.0 additionally allows to export arbitrary global products to the widely used NetCDF/CF-format.

Release 2.1 of the SMOS-Box is a maintenance release. The main new feature is the export of grid points in the Earth Explorer format.

CHRIS-Box 1.5.2 is a release which allows the CHRIS-Box to run properly with BEAM 4.8.

The release 2.2 of the Envisat Reader API now functions correctly on 64-bit architectures.

The respective installers can be downloaded from
http://www.brockmann-consult.de/cms/web/beam/software.

June 2010

28.06.-02.07.2010 BC on the ESA Living Planet Symposium in Bergen.

BC will be present on the ESA Living Planet Symposium in Bergen presenting a company stand, oral presentations, BEAM training courses and posters.
We will be happy to meet you there.

Interview with Dr. Carsten Brockmann (Brockmann Consult) (Adobe Flash Player)

April 2010

6.-7.05.2010 Marcoast presented at the Space Downstream Conference in Tallinn, Estonia.

More than 300 scientists, researchers, market specialists, business executives, government representatives and leaders of regions exchanged and shared their experiences, new ideas, and research results on diverse aspects of satellite services.
Carsten Brockmann represented the Marine and Coastal Service Marcoast, a GMES downstream service.
Marcoast is a major contribution to the Water Quality Service System WAQSS operated by Brockmann Consult.

29.04.2010 BEAM 4.7.1. released.

Version 4.7.1 of BEAM is a maintenance update.
Multiple issues have been addressed to improve the usability of VISAT with the focus on the management of image masks and regions of interest, and their display.
It also fixes a number of minor bugs and additionally improves the BEAM Graph Processing Framework (GPF API) in better supporting the development of "window processing" such as image filters and convolutions.

19.04.2010 ESOV-NG 1.6.3 released.

The version 1.6.3 of the ESOV NG application has been released and it can be downloaded from the Esov distribution web site.

ESOV NG allows users to visualize and print Instrument swaths, Ground tracks, Zone coverages, Ground Station Visibility and to generate overpass table for generic Earth Observation LEO satellites. Support for Envisat, ERS-1, ERS-2, Cryosat, ADM, SMOS, Metop is built in, more satellites can be added easily.

12+13.04.2010 Aquamar kicked off.

The European GMES Downstream project Aquamar is started.
In Aquamar new products and services supporting the monitoring of the marine environment will be developed. The project is lead by Thales Alenia Space (France) and a technical coordination board (Brockmann Consult is member).
The new developments will enhance Brockmann Consult's Water Quality Service System (WAQSS).

March 2010

31.03.2010 SMOS Data Distribution started.

Brockmann Consult has started the distribution of SMOS data to ESAs Calibration and Validation team.
SMOS is an Earth Explorer satellite launched by the European Space Agency in December 2009. After successful commissioning of the spacecraft and instrument, the distribution of SMOS data to the science community has started.
Brockmann Consult is receiving all SMOS data, processes them and submits them via ftp to the globally distributed experts.

08.03.2010 CHRIS-Box 1.5 Add-on for BEAM 4.7 released.

The BEAM CHRIS-Box project has been brought into life in order to support users of data of the CHRIS sensor onboard of the ESA Proba platform. The CHRIS-Box comprises the following add-on modules for BEAM:

Noise Reduction

Cloud Screeening

Atmospheric Correction

Geometric Correction

For more information, please refer to the CHRIS-Box Wiki.

The add-on installer can be downloaded from the BEAM download page or from the CHRIS-Box Wiki.

February 2010

22.02.2010 BEAM 4.7 released.

The final version of BEAM 4.7 is out now.
We want to thank our users for the valueable feedback we have gotten regarding the RC1 release.
Read more about the new release in the change log and the news entry about the Release Candidate.
For an overview of the changes made to the API please refer to our Wiki - BEAM 4.7 API Changes.

January 2010

07.01.2010 ESOV-NG 1.6.1 released.

ESOV NG is a public Software tool made available by the European Space Agency to its users for satellite orbit determination.
It is developed by Brockmann Consult GmbH with the objective of improving and modernising the existing ESOV Classic tool.

The software is available at the ESA Download site.

ESOV NG allows users to visualize and print Instrument swaths, Ground tracks, Zone coverages, Ground Station Visibility and to generate overpass table for generic Earth Observation LEO satellites.
Support for Envisat, ERS-1, ERS-2, Cryosat, ADM, SMOS, Metop is built in, more satellites can be added easily.

November 2009

12.-13.11.2009 User training for products of marine earth observation data (in the Framework of the DeMarine Project)

On November 12 and 13 Brockmann Consult gave a training course on Aquatic Remote Sensing to users of the national GMES project DeMarine.
The training course gave an overview on ocean remote sensing and an introduction into the BEAM Toolbox.
The 14 participants came from national agencies and from scientific institutes.

06.11.2009 Brockmann Consult preparing for SMOS first light

Brockmann Consult is preparing for the first light from ESA's Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission, which was successfully launched into orbit from northern Russia on 2 November. 'First light' is expected to occur in the second week of December.

Brockmann Consult, being responsible for the archival and distribution of SMOS data products to principal investigators, is looking forward to test its facilities with the final test data suite going to be packaged by ESA next week.

Besides preparing the distribution of SMOS data, Brockmann Consult is developing the SMOS-Toolbox for BEAM (SMOS-Box), Version 2.0 of which is going to be released by the end of November, a week before the SMOS 'first light'. The toolbox has been brought into life in order to support users of data acquired by ESA's SMOS mission. Both BEAM and the SMOS-Box are scientific software tools, which ESA/ESRIN is providing free of charge to the earth observation community.

September 2009

09.09.2009 Sen3Exp campaign conducted under leadership of Brockmann Consult

As part of the development process for ESA’s Sentinel-3 Earth observation mission, remote-sensing experts carried out an extensive experiment campaign across southern Europe this summer.
The results provide valuable insight into the imagery the mission will deliver after it is launched in 2013.

read more...

August 2009

22.-23.08.2009 A BEAM Training Course in Tallinn

A BEAM Training Course has been successfully conducted in the framework of the Nordic Network for Aquatic Remote Sensing and the EU FP-7 project ESTSPACE. Researchers and Students of Finland, Estonia, Lihtuania, Poland, Sweden and Russia participated in the training courses.

For more information about BEAM training courses please
contact Kerstin Stelzer.

July 2009

09.07.2009 BC will be on TV: RTL Regional "Wissen X-act", Tuesday 09.07.09, 18:00

The documentation is about the Wadden Sea UNESCO World Nature Heritage and the role of remote sensing application for the monitoring of the intertidal flats.

CHL_20010303-20010309	CHL_20010308-20010314	CHL_20010312-20010318	CHL_20010321-20010328
This year's spring bloom in the Kattegat and western Baltic Sea can be clearly detected with satellite data (here: MERIS sensor onboard ENVISAT satellite). Chlorophyll concentrations and extent of the spring bloom can be seen here.