As part of the Copernicus programme of the European Commission (EC), the European Space Agency (ESA) has developed and is currently operating the Sentinel-2 mission that is acquiring high spatial resolution optical imagery. This article provides a description of the calibration activities and the status of the mission products validation activities after one year in orbit. Measured performances, from the validation activities, cover both Top-Of-Atmosphere (TOA) and Bottom-Of-Atmosphere (BOA) products. The presented results show the good quality of the mission products both in terms of radiometry and geometry and provide an overview on next mission steps related to data quality aspects.

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The SAP4PRISMA is a four year research project which aims at developing algorithms and products for the future PRISMA mission. The project started on May 2010 and is now entering his full activities as the 'PRISMA like' data set has been defined and the test areas were selected. The paper describes the main project objectives and the activities realized in the first 9 months of the project

Global trend patterns of yearly mean total column water (TCW) from the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) 20th century atmosphere model ERA-20CM (1900–2009) and the currently state-of-the-art reanalysis ERA-Interim (1979–2012) show common features of statistically significant upward trends. Of particular interest appears a pronounced regional dipole pattern of interannual climate variability over the South American continent particularly evident in ERA-Interim data. The trend dipole affects two distinct areas: the Andean Amazon basin and the Northeast Brazil. The target regions are characterized by rising and decreasing water content associated with water vapor convergence (divergence) and upward (downward) mass fluxes, respectively. As expected, local water vapor feedback due to local surface temperature change does to not fully explain this TCW trend dipole; other mechanisms may play a role in establishing the observed feature such as moisture transports and monsoon variability in the last decade. The observed trends of the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) during the period 1982–2005 show an increasing greenness that coincides with the moistening of the atmospheric column in the Amazon basin. These results are substantiated by two single-station ground-based GPS measurements of TCW vapor (TCWV) from the two target regions

The SAP4PRISMA project research activities aimed at supporting the Italian hyperspectral PRISMA mission by developing preliminary processing chains suitable for PRISMA to obtain high level hyperspectral data products for agriculture, land degradation, natural and human hazards