Skip to 0 minutes and 31 seconds Welcome to the EUMETSAT course on monitoring the oceans from space. The oceans, this vast expanse of blue, are the biggest feature on our planet. They’re the reason that we call Earth “the blue planet.” They’re an important part of the Earth’s engine. And they matter for all of us– all of our everyday lives.
Skip to 0 minutes and 51 seconds Like much of our Earth and atmosphere, it’s changing. And we’re watching the changes happening. But along with those changes is coming a revolution in satellite technology. The oceans are enormous. And so instead of going out to individual places, we can have satellites orbiting overhead, watching the oceans for us constantly. And now more than ever, established systems of satellites are watching the oceans. And this course is all about the data that they provide and the difference it makes to our lives.
Skip to 1 minute and 24 seconds Monitoring the ocean tells us about hazards. It tells us about how to manage the ocean sustainably. It tells about how our climate is changing. And it tells about our food supply. So it’s not just scientists that are using this information. It’s policymakers, and it’s all of us.
Skip to 1 minute and 43 seconds We’re very connected to our marine environment. You can see tourism, fishing boats, military vessels, lots of people out having fun, sailing, for example. We need to understand how we interact with the marine environment and how we impact it in order to preserve these sorts of activities for the future.
Skip to 2 minutes and 9 seconds Welcome to EUMETSAT, the home of this course and the heart of many of the satellite operations we’ll be looking at.
Skip to 2 minutes and 18 seconds It’s incredibly important to know what the oceans are doing. And the role that satellites play in that is the story we’d like to tell. We’d also like to bring people a bit inside to how we look after the spacecraft and how we get the data out to people and also just to show the variety of users that there are who use all this data and what they’re doing with it. And this satellite data really matters for individuals. It affects people’s lives. This is a really exciting time. We’ve just had some new satellites launched. You’re going to hear a lot about Sentinel-3 during this course.
Skip to 2 minutes and 46 seconds That is a game changer in terms of the research we’re going to be able to do with it. I work with satellite ocean color. And that’s very intimately connected to the biology of our oceans, which has lots of applications that we can use to help people. So there’s lots of variety and lots to look forward to on this course.
