Scanning the Canopy: ESA’s Biomass Radar Craft Maps Global Forest Carbon with P‑Band Vision
The European Space Agency’s Biomass mission is a groundbreaking Earth observation program focused on measuring the amount of carbon stored in the world’s forests. Selected in 2013 as ESA’s seventh Earth Explorer research mission, Biomass was conceived to address a critical gap in our understanding of the global carbon cycle en.wikipedia.org nceo.ac.uk. By providing the first comprehensive measurements of forest biomass from space, Biomass aims to reduce uncertainties in how much carbon forests store and how those stocks are changing en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org. This data is essential for climate science – forests absorb roughly one-third of humanity’s annual CO₂ emissions – yet current knowledge of forest carbon is limited by sparse ground data and partial satellite coverage airbus.com airbus.com.
