Earth Explorer User Consultation Meetings
User Consultation Meetings are key milestones in the process of realising Earth Explorer satellite missions. These meetings follow the years of scientific and technical studies devoted to candidate mission concepts and the resulting reports for assessment and reports for selection. The User Consultation Meetings allow the science community to come together to discuss the merits of the candidates and lead to a recommendation as to which candidate should be put forward for further development or to be selected as the next Earth Explorer mission.
Earth Explorer 11
The User Consultation Meeting for Earth Explorer 11 was held on 10–11 October 2023 in Bucharest, Romania. The meeting supported the selection of two out of the four candidate missions (noted below) to enter Phase A. The replay of the event has been split into seven videos.
Cairt – to unravel the intricate connections between circulation and composition throughout the middle atmosphere, and the role they play in climate forcing and feedbacks.
Nitrosat – to detect and characterise sources of reactive nitrogen from farms, industrial complexes, transport, fires and urban areas.
Seastar – to observe small-scale ocean dynamics at an unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution in coastal areas, shelf seas and marginal ice zones.
Wivern – to deliver the first space-based observations of in-cloud winds, complementing wind in clear air and thin cloud data from the Aeolus-2 mission.
In November 2024, the decision was taken to proceed with Cairt and Wivern.
Earth Explorer 10
The User Consultation Meeting for Earth Explorer 10 was held on 5 July 2022 at ESA’s ESTEC establishment in the Netherlands. In this case, the Harmony mission is the only candidate for Earth Explorer 10. The mission would measure various aspects of ocean dynamics to understand how air and the ocean surface interact, which, in turn, will improve weather prediction and climate models.
Earth Explorer 9
The User Consultation Meeting was held on 16–17 July 2019 in Cambridge in the UK. The candidates were the Far-infrared Outgoing Radiation Understanding and Monitoring (FORUM) mission and the Sea-surface Kinematics Multiscale monitoring (SKIM) mission. The replay of the event has been split into six videos.
FORUM was subsequently selected for implementation as ESA’s nineth Earth Explorer mission.
Earth Explorer 8
The User Consultation Meeting was held on 15–16 September 2015 in Krakow in Poland. The candidates were the CarbonSat mission and the Fluorescence Explorer (FLEX) mission. The replay of the event has been split into six separate videos.
FLEX was subsequently selected for implementation as ESA’s eighth Earth Explorer mission.
Earth Explorer 7
The User Consultation meeting was held on 5–6 March 2013 in Graz in Austria. The candidates were the Biomass mission, the Cold Regions Hydrology and high-resolution Observatory (CoReH2O) mission and the Process Exploration through Measurement of infrared and millimetre-wave Emitted Radiation (PREMIER) mission. The replay of the event has been split into seven videos.
Biomass was subsequently selected for implementation as ESA’s eighth Earth Explorer mission.
