Remote detection of the Earth's evapotranspiration for NASA and ESA

Taking a look back at the success stories of 2022, the Luxembourg Institite of Science and Technology (LIST) contributed to the Ecosystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on the Space Station (ECOSTRESS) mission by successfully implementing the European ECOSTRESS hub and supplying lots of ecosystem data on the thematic operating platform on food security.

"The European ECOSTRESS Hub integrates a team of researchers to work on a common goal to understand water stress variability from space. One part is dedicated to advancing science algorithm and global validation of water stress, and another part focus on high-end
engineering architecture to build the hub for algorithm integration in a cloud environment. This project is a perfect example of LIST’s
interdisciplinarity between science and technology and a precursor for ESA’s future water-cycle mission." Tian Hu

This achievement led to the EURANUS follow-up project, funded by the European Space Agency (ESA), which, on a European and African scale, aims to develop products relating to the surface temperature of the land, evaporation, productivity of ecosystems and the efficiency of water use, using all ECOSTRESS archives.

Thanks to this effort, LIST's "Surface Temperature Initiated Closure" (STIC) evaporation model has become one of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory's official algorithms for generating ECOSTRESS products on the water cycle on a continental scale. These evaporation products with high spatial resolution from the International Space Station's sensor greatly facilitate future studies attempting to quantify the impact of ecosystem restoration on water availability at a regional level, as already reported in Nature Geosciences by the former PhD student from DTU Hydro-CSI, Anne Hoek van Dijke, and her supervisors.

Discover more success stories in the digital version of the LIST 2022 annual report.