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Space-borne Earth Observation (EO) data depicting vegetation covered land surfaces contain insufficient information for an unambiguous interpretation of the spectral signal in terms of variables that characterize the vegetation state (e.g., leaf area index, leaf chlorophyll content and proportion of senescent material). For the retrieval of vegetation properties from EO data, an optimal estimate of the state variables needs to be found. The uncertainty of such an estimate can be reduced by combining EO data and in situ data. Information provided by citizens represents a valuable and mostly inexpensive source for in situ data. Since the quality of such data can be diverse, the consideration of uncertainties is of great importance. In this contribution, we present a concept for the elicitation of local knowledge from citizens with respect to the application of management practices (e.g., sowing and harvesting date, irrigation) and the instantaneous state of crops. The concept includes the acquisition of in situ data as well as an uncertainty assessment (precision and/or accuracy). The latter involves a profiling in which inherent uncertainties are quantified for individual citizens. This concept was tested for agricultural fields of the Durable Environmental Multidisciplinary Monitoring Information Network (DEMMIN) test site in Northeast Germany. Within the frame of several field seminars, students were requested to assess management practices and the instantaneous state of crops. Furthermore, they assessed their own ability to create valid data. They filled in pseudonymized questionnaires from which we created corresponding datasets. At the same day, field data were collected with appropriate equipment and can be used as reference against which student estimates can be compared. The level of compliance between estimated and measured data was determined on an individual basis. The results of this analysis will be presented. Conclusions will be drawn regarding the ability of the students to evaluate their own skills. In addition, we will demonstrate an approach for a digital ascertainment of in situ data. In the future, this approach will be used to collect in situ data for the setup of refined prior information within the frame of the Earth Observation Land Data Assimilation System (EO-LDAS).

Das Weltraumwetter wird hauptsächlich durch die Sonne verursacht und wirkt über die Kette Magnetosphäre, Thermosphäre und Ionosphärein auf die Erdatmosphäre ein. Physik und Effekte des Weltraumwetters zeichnen sich durch hohe Dynamik aus. Von der systematischen Erforschung der komplexen Zusammenhänge des Weltraumwetters erwarten wir eine tieferes Verständnis der Beeinflussung unserer technologischen Umwelt und des menschlichen Lebens durch die Sonne und andere kosmische Quellen. Monitoring, Modellierung und Vorhersage des Weltraumwetters sind die Voraussetzungen zur Reduzierung potenzieller Gefährdungen der Funktionalität technischer Systeme oder des menschlichen Lebens.

The Northeast German Lowland Observatory (TERENO-NE) was established to investigate the regional impact of climate and land use change. TERENO-NE focuses on the Northeast German lowlands, for which a high vulnerability has been determined due to increasing temperatures and decreasing amounts of precipitation projected for the coming decades. To facilitate in-depth evaluations of the effects of climate and land use changes and to separate the effects of natural and anthropogenic drivers in the region, six sites were chosen for comprehensive monitoring. In addition, at selected sites, geoarchives were used to substantially extend the instrumental records back in time. It is this combination of diverse disciplines working across different time scales that makes the observatory TERENO-NE a unique observation platform. We provide information about the general characteristics of the observatory and its six monitoring sites and present examples of interdisciplinary research activities at some of these sites. We also illustrate how monitoring improves process understanding, how remote sensing techniques are fine-tuned by the most comprehensive ground-truthing site DEMMIN, how soil erosion dynamics have evolved, how greenhouse gas monitoring of rewetted peatlands can reveal unexpected mechanisms, and how proxy data provides a long-term perspective of current ongoing changes.

Measurements of environmental parameters for the validation of remote sensing data in DEMMIN are based on the measurements of stationary environmental monitoring stations. In addition to this network, these data are supplemented by in-situ campaigns to obtain plant and soil parameters for calibration and validation of the remote sensing data. The paper provides a status update for the German JECAM test site DEMMIN / TERENO-NO.

Joint Experiment for Crop Assessment and Monitoring (JECAM) - Test Site DEMMIN 2018 Project Overview: Test site and project team

The Earth Observation Center (EOC) is a cluster institute of the German Aerospace Center (DLR). The EOC comprises the German Remote Sensing Data Center (DFD) and the Remote Sensing Technology Institute (IMF), at work in Oberpfaffenhofen, Neustrelitz, Berlin-Adlershof and Bremen. With its national and international receiving stations, DFD offers direct access to data from earth observation missions, derives information products from the raw data, disseminates these products to users, and safeguards all data in the National Remote Sensing Data Library for long-term use. The EOC operates the National Ground Station Neustrelitz (NSG), which is used as main ground station for the payload data reception of high rate data stream (X-Band, Ka-Band). In the beginning of the 90th, after finishing the INTERKOSMOS program, the station development has started into a new era. First projects have been OKEAN, the solar mission CORONAS-I/F, and the joint project MOMS/PRIRODA. Nowadays, the ground station is involved operationally for remote sensing missions like TerraSAR-X, TanDEM-X, Landsat-8, Landsat-7, KOMPSAT, Sentinel-1A/B, OCEANSAT-2, AQUA, TERRA, and for several small explorer missions. A number of Indian and international projects have been successfully supported. On behalf of ESA, the EOC, especially NGS with specific front end processing systems, has developed and operates the Sentinel-5P Ground System inclusive the operations of ground station elements at Svalbard and Inuvik. The paper describes the evolution process over two decades with respect to the station site and infrastructure, and the main hardware and software design. It focuses on the automation system of the station, which is either today station specific. From the beginning, the development goal was full integration in a highly automated multi-mission system. Relevant working areas are reception planning, reception automation, and quality control. Starting from long-term experience in data reception a software system supporting operations planner and operators has been developed. This system realizes a fast and reliable adopting of changing operation scenarios, a stable station monitoring and control and an objective collection of reception quality data. Furthermore, the paper gives a detailed view on the main integration and production component: the Front-End Processing system (FEP). In this role, the FEP is capable to be easily integrated in local and external facilities and provides a rich bundle of functions beside an excellent expandability and maintainability having limited resources.

Presentation of new Projects of DLR Neustrelitz and their resulting requirements for archiving of large data massive

Das Deutsches Fernerkundungsdatenzentrum mit seiner Empfangsstation in Neustrelitz ist seit 2009 Teil des Real Time Solar Wind (RTSW) Netzwerks zum Empfang des Satellite Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE). Die empfangenen Daten werden in Echtzeit an das Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) in Boulder weitergeleitet, stehen aber beispielsweise auch zeitnah den Wissenschaftlern zur Ableitung von Warnungen im Zusammenhang von Sonnenstürmen zur Verfügung. Die erfolgreiche Zusammenarbeit mit der National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) wird mit der Erweiterung der Empfangskapazitäten auf den Anfang des Jahres gestarteten Nachfolge-Satelliten Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) fortgesetzt. Der Vortrag stellt die genutzten technischen Systeme und ihre Einbindung in internationale Kooperationen vor.

Within the last few years the situation of satellite and airborne supported remote sensing has changed fundamentally. The reasons can be explained among others by the following aspects: • technical and technological developments and factors, such as the increase of the number of earth observation missions (e.g. multiple satellite missions on different or on one orbit), new advanced sensor technologies (e.g. SAR- and hyperspectral sensors of high spatial resolution), new storage media and storage technologies, and new improved data processing (e.g. automated interpretation algorithms and processing chains), • market-oriented aspects (e.g. private remote sensing missions, such as QuickBird or RapidEye). In addition to this the development was politically forced by European Union (EU) and European Space Agency (ESA) having established the program "Global monitoring for environment and Security" (COPERNICUS; erstwhile called GMES), which serves the development of an operative European Earth observation satellite fleet to combine earth observation monitoring with airborne remote sensing supported by terrestrial, maritime in-situ-measuring networks and additional data sources in operative process chains as well as services. Besides the continuous provisioning of user friendly and reliable earth observation services e.g. to climate protection, for ecological survey, humanitarian assistance or for the reply to security-relevant questions the COPERNICUS initiative is aimed at the establishment of a European market for innovative remote sensing based services. TERrestrial ENvironmental Observatories (TERENO) - Initiative of the Helmholtz community, operates on a temporal and spatial scale that make i.) integration of remote sensing technologies and ii.) the combination of these technologies with in-situ-measurement technologies urgently needed. Both aspects require an advanced management and archiving design including appropriate technology and technological infrastructure to ensure a reliable long-term archiving. In the lecture, the DFD will present its solution the Data and Information Management System (DIMS) including its experience in archiving large data-massive. For a data provision to solute scientific questions in distant future additional aspects will be considered like data curation and interoperability in a service oriented environment.

Aktueller Stand und Ausblick auf die Langzeitarchivierung von Satellitendaten zur Erdbeobachtung und In-situ Daten im NRSDA (National Remote Sensing Data Archiv)

The FireBIRD mission has been designed to detect and monitor dynamic high temperature events, such as wild fires or volcano eruptions. In order to provide calibrated and geo-referenced data in near real time to users, a ground processing system is going to be established and deployed in the downstream chain in the national ground segment in Neustrelitz. The ground processing system consists of the Payload System Management (PSM) and one or more Instrument Processing Facility (IPFs). Due to the experimental nature of small satellite missions the components of the ground system have been often specific solutions. The design of the FireBIRD ground segment uses a modular design with separate control and payload data interfaces. For data interfaces abstract data descriptions are used in order to achieve a mission independent design to a large extend. A design constraint is to separate processing control components from data processing components as far as possible. The goal is to achieve extendibility and reusability of the processing components as well as portability of the IPF to other systems and migration for future missions.

EnMAP (Environmental Mapping and Analysis Program) is a German hyperspectral satellite mission, with a ground segment operated by the Earth Observation Center (EOC) and the German Space Operation Center (GSOC) of the German Aerospace Center (DLR). The Ground Segment comprises all the facilities and systems required on Earth to control and operate the mission. It specifically facilitates access for the user segment to the space segment, including the commanding of the satellite, ordering and receiving data, and finally the processing, archiving and distribution of data. This paper gives an overview of the design of the Integration and Technical Verification and Validation (ITVV) phase of the Ground Segment. It starts with the design of the Ground Segment resulting in the development model, which consists of the requirements imposed on the Ground Segment, the spanning of the product tree with its contributing subsystems and their further differentiation, and the interfaces connecting them providing the needed functionality. This view of the Ground Segment is complemented with a model based on use cases allowing to characterize the Ground Segment by its dynamic behaviour fulfilling the above tasks. Based on the above knowledge the different stages of the ITVV Phase are presented and the dependencies between the phases are pointed out, to finally guarantee a fully validated mission.

The German Aerospace Center DLR – namely the Applied Remote Sensing Cluster CAF and the German Space Operations Center GSOC – is responsible for the establishment of the ground segment of the future German hyper-spectral satellite mission EnMAP (Environmental Mapping and Analysis Program- http://www.enmap.org, planned launch 2014). The Applied Remote Sensing Cluster has not only a long standing experiences with air- and spaceborne processing and analysis of hyper-spectral image data but also with building and operation of payload ground segments for a multitude of missions. This paper gives an overview of the mission and its elements. It mainly deals with the operational and automatic chain from reception via processing to delivery.

This document provides a map of the existing and planned European infrastructure on data archive and dissemination, based on the experiences of various technical operators at both national and European level. These experiences have been collected over the period April 2008 to April 2009 via a webbased survey with call for participation sent via e-mail to several partners of the previous and current GMES and INSPIRE projects. The collected feedback has been integrated with the provided reference documentation and the information available in the relevant web sites. ES needs in terms of infrastructure have been analyzed and infrastructures and infrastructure projects have been identified so as to derive a description of the characteristics of the infrastructures of the coming years. This has enabled to assess GENESI-DR versus the current axes of development in infrastructures. The document also describes European and national digital repositories (archives) which have answered to the questionnaire in terms of:  Archive systems: archive backup and recovery systems; archive media in use (transcription systems and policy);  Access to archive via gateways: connection to high speed networks;  Contents of the archives (EO missions, duration, coverage and volume), data curation aspects and preparation to long term preservation, So as to derive the main characteristics of the current digital repositories. This document is an output of the work package TNA4.3. A first version was provided at milestone M10. It is now enriched by further collection of information, in particular about the DR integrated in GENESI-DR, and by general improvements to make clearer the approach of this document and the usefulness of the derived information.

Aim of GENESI-DR is to achieve following objectives: - To provide a base for (establishing) a world-wide e-infrastructure for Earth Science with European leadership - To provide guaranteed, reliable, easy, effective, and operational access to a variety of data sources, and demonstrate how the same approach can be extended to provide access to all Earth Science data - To harmonise operations at key Earth Science data repositories limiting fragmentation of solutions - To demonstrate effective curation and prepare the frame for approaching long term preservation of Earth Science data - To validate the effective capabilities required to access distributed repositories for new communities, including education, and assess benefits and impacts - To integrate new scientific and technological derived paradigms in operational infrastructures in responds to the latest Earth Science requirements Realisation of GENESI-DR is not only a technical challenge. Only in conjunction with the solving of political issues the project will have success in the future. Network Activity 4 (NA4) is responsible for covering these political issues. It will deal with data policy aspects and contacts with national and international organisations and provide the usage policy input for Service Activities (SA1, SA2). In the frame of sub-task TNA4.1 - Relation with European and National Policy Bodies- NA4 has to identify European Bodies concerned in the management of Earth science data. In a first step it will compile a survey of National, European and International Interest Groups involved in Data and Resources Access Policy. From these existing data policies it will derive and update as needed the overall GENESI-DR access policies for Earth science data. This survey is the content of this document.

At DLR/DFD the Data and Information Management System DIMS is used for handling and archiving remote sensing data. One task of DIMS is to support ongoing and upcoming new earth observation missions, the typical lifetime of an individual mission being 5 to 10 years. New missions (like TerraSAR-X or MetOp) tend to have additional requirements with respect to the functionality of the application software but also higher requirements with respect to the performance, reliability and availability of the whole system (hardware, Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) software and application software). The other important task of DIMS is to carefully preserve the valuable remote sensing data beyond the mission’s duration for future generations, since the earth’s surface and climate continuously change and data gathered today cannot be regained later if lost. This task is commonly known as long-term archiving. Both the continuous support of missions and long term archiving require keeping DIMS in continuous operation; at the same time hardware and COTS software have to be renewed due to limited service lifetime and to meet new reliability and performance requirements. New versions of the application software have to be brought into operation as well. The challenge is renewing DIMS hardware and software components without interrupting operations for more than a few days. A similarly great challenge is preserving the remote sensing data currently archived in DIMS (ca. 150 TByte) by migrating them to new storage media while continuously providing access.

Since 2004 DLR Neustrelitz operates the Space Weather Application Center – Ionosphere (SWACI). This Center is involved in several projects of the Space Situational Awareness (SSA) program of ESA and of EU FP7. It is largely based on services and tools of DLR’s Data and Information Management System (DIMS) and its long-standing User interface EoWEB. SWACI provides access to near real time products and ensures long-term preservation. The lecture will analyze the existing solution and various project-specific applications and will derive requirements for a recent user interface. In the second part the talk will draw a design of an user interface for the Ionospheric Monitoring and Prediction Center (IMPC), which continues utilizing existing services of DLR, offers OGC compliant interfaces and which is so generalized that future projects can be easily plugged in.

In order to provide space weather information, which are in particular relevant for user of communication and navigation systems, the German Aerospace Center (DLR) is operating the online platform Space Weather Application Center Ionosphere (SWACI) since 2004. SWACI has started as a feasibility study and has been continuously extended and improved and is now a grown up system ready to be transformed into an Ionospheric Monitoring and Prediction Center (IMPC). The IMPC, as a permanent ionospheric weather service, will use ground as well as space based GNSS data, such as GPS and GLONASS measurements, and non-GNSS data such as vertical sounding data of ionosonde stations, radio beacons and solar wind data to provide relevant information for GNSS users in the area of telecommunication, precise radio-measurements and navigation. DLR is highly experienced in the reception, archiving, distribution and utilization of earth observation data in 24/7 operation mode. Therefore the IMPC is based on a dedicated infrastructure developed at DLR, where a fully automated Data Information and Management System (DIMS) is used for quality control, long-term data archiving as well as for dissemination of data to end users. A very large amount of ionospheric data covering high, medium and low solar activity periods over the globe has been captured, processed and archived since 1995. The captured data is being used for ionospheric research including modelling and characterization of ionospheric parameters and effects. This talk gives an introduction in the future IMPC. It will demonstrate samples of products, e.g. European and global maps of the total electron content (TEC) monitored by DLR and available via the SWACI/ IMPC platform in near real-time. SWACI/ IMPC provides solar wind parameters taken with the ACE satellite (and his successor DSCOVR) and models their impact within the physical interaction chain in the atmosphere to significantly increase the prediction time of hazardous perturbations. The lecture will present an overview of existing facilities and their development to an IMPC.