Deadline for abstract submission has been extended to the 8th of February 2016 ! For more information on the 2nd EARSeL SIG LU/LC and NASA LCLUC joint Workshop “Advancing horizons for land cover services entering the big data era” taking place in Prague on 6-7 May 2016, please go to https://web.natur.cuni.cz/gis/lucc/ If you have further questions regarding the workshop please contact the local organisers.

Feel free to contact the GOFC-GOLD Land Cover Offfice for any questions related to the content of the newsletter.

The Theia Land Data Centre 4th bulletin is now available. Topics covered in this issue include:

• Theia-Geosud seminar
• All Envi thematic knowledge exploitation programme
• Thematic Clusters
• National institutional remote sensing sector
• Investigating the water and carbon cycles

The bulletin can be downloaded in print version (4,1MB) or light version (921KB) from theia-land.fr. The Theia new bulletin is also available as flipbook on Theia Calameo platform.

Dear community: USAID PEER is a competitive grants program that invites scientists in developing countries to apply for funds to support research and capacity-building activities on topics with strong potential development impacts. Pre-proposals are due January 15, 2016. Because of your NASA-funded work, you may be contacted by PEER applicants who are interested in partnering with you to apply for this opportunity.

The NASA-ISRO Professional Engineer and Scientist Exchange Program (PESEP) is available for NASA-funded researchers interested in establishing interactions with ISRO researchers, leading to joint publications from analyses of ISRO, NASA and other satellite datasets.

The Alaska Satellite Facility now distributes the complete ESA Sentinel-1A SAR archive, by agreement between the U.S. State Department and the European Commission.

today we are happy to announce the opening of the S2A data access to all users via the Scientific data Hub: https://scihub.esa.int/ The Sentinel-2A data quality status can be found at: https://sentinels.copernicus.eu/documents/247904/685211/Sentinel-2+Data+... Sentinel-2 is currently in its Ramp-up Phase, milestones can be found here: https://sentinel.esa.int/web

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The latest satellite for the European Commission’s Copernicus environmental programme has left France bound for the Plesetsk launch site in Russia and launch late next month. Sentinel-3A is scheduled for liftoff on a Rockot launcher at the end of December. Carrying a suite of state-of-the-art instruments, Sentinel-3A is set to provide an unprecedented step forward in the Copernicus marine, land, atmosphere and climate change services. Sentinel-3A wrapped up The satellite began its two-day journey from Thales Alenia Space in Cannes to Nice airport by lorry during the night.

ESA plans to track the health of the world’s vegetation by detecting and measuring the faint glow that plants give off as they convert sunlight and the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide into energy. Yielding information about the health and stress of the planet’s vegetation is important as the growing global population places increasing demands on the production of food and animal feed. Following a rigorous selection process, the satellite will be ESA’s eighth Earth Explorer, planned for launch by 2022.