Fig. 1: Antenna of the VIGISAT receiving station
On the sidelines of the ESA Globcurrent meeting hold in Brest from the 7th to the 9th of March 2012, Henri Laur (responsible for the ESA Earth Observation Missions Management Office) and Yves-Louis Desnos (Head Research & Development section & Senior Advisor EO Science and Applications Department) organized, with IFREMER, a special event to celebrate the 10 years of marine observations with ENVISAT. CLS took the opportunity to invite them for a presentation of its infrastructures and activities in Brest.
They visited the VIGISAT receiving station (see figure 1). VIGISAT is operated by CLS as a station for direct reception, processing and analysis of satellite images. VIGISAT acquires, processes, analyses and distributes near real time high-resolution radar images from the Canadian RADARSAT-1 and RADARSAT-2 satellites and the European ENVISAT and ERS-2 satellites. Thanks to the satellite radar imagery and to the CLS expertise, VIGISAT offers services of ocean monitoring and observation to the authorities responsible for state operations at sea, as well as to researchers, environmental associations, etc. In 2011, the station acquired more than 1800 SAR images and processed more than 13400 SAR products.
More than 50% of the products acquired by VIGISAT are dedicated to Soprano demonstration service in order to produce in near real time Level-2 swell products from level-1 Wide swath single-look complex products. the demonstration chain to generate of these new L2 products has been set-up at the very beginning of March 2011. This visit was for us a good opportunity to show and discuss the first results with Henri Laur and Yves-Louis Desnos (see figure 2). Most of the results obtained during Soprano project will be presented at SEASAR 2012 symposium.
- Fig. 2: From left to right: Henir Laur, Yves-Louis Desnos, Dr. Fab and Alexis Mouche discussing Soprano’s results at CLS-Brest