Satellitenfernerkundung von Landoberflächen – Beginn einer neuen Ära

System Erde; 7
Satellite remote sensing offers the possibility to continuously, globally collect information about Earth’s surface properties, and thus possesses an enormous scientific and economic potential. The spatio-temporal recording of information opens up a wide range of possibilities for large-scale monitoring of changes and influencing factors, e.g. in atmospheric research, agriculture and forestry, geology, urban areas and the analysis of natural hazards. The European Union‘s Copernicus programme marks the beginning of a new era in satellite-based Earth observation by designing and launching the Sentinel series, an operational fleet of high-continuity, multi-combinable observation systems. This enables completely new objects of investigation, but also requires a new level of automated data processing in order to make the huge amounts of data available for analysis. This article provides an insight into current remote sensing research at the GFZ. First, it presents the activities related to the creation of preprocessing standards and interfaces for data evaluation, geo-data management and visualization. In the following, examples for multi-sensor analysis of land use potentials and natural hazards are shown, in order to finally discuss the role of the GFZ in the development of hyperspectral satellite missions and related data analysis.