These Colorful Satellite Views Reveal Our Forests in Unprecedented Detail and Showcase the Potential of the New Biomass Mission
The European Space Agency’s satellite will measure trunks, branches and stems in forests to shed light on how much carbon is stored in trees across various continents
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It looks like funky graphic art: splotches of brilliant purples and blues on a light green background, with dark curlicues twisting diagonally across the frame. But it’s not art. It’s a Bolivian forest and river—and one of the first images released by Biomass, a European Space Agency (ESA) satellite mission tasked with investigating the state of our planet’s forests and their role in the carbon cycle.
This week, the ESA revealed a suite of new images from the Biomass satellite during the Living Planet Symposium, a conference related to Earth observation from space.
“It was extremely emotional, because it was the work of hundreds of people,” Simonetta Cheli, ESA’s director of Earth observation programs, tells Space.com’s Daisy Dobrijevic. “It’s very symbolic of the effort behind the scenes and the potential that this mission has.”
Biomass launched into orbit on April 29 and is the first satellite to be equipped with a P-band synthetic aperture radar. Simply put, that’s a tool that can measure the biomass of forests—including trunks, branches and stems—which crucially also indicates how much carbon is stored in the vegetation. “It has the capability to do sort of a scan, like when you do a medical scan, of the forest,” Cheli said at a pre-launch briefing earlier this year, as reported by Space News’ Jeff Foust.
Need to know: Biomass satellite
The European Space Agency’s Biomass satellite is slated to operate for at least five years. It will create 3D maps of forests and forest floors to calculate the amount of vegetation within them, which scientists will use as a proxy for the amount of carbon stored in the trees.
Trees convert around eight billion tons of atmospheric carbon dioxide into carbon and oxygen every year, releasing oxygen back into the air and absorbing the carbon. When trees die—or are cut down as part of deforestation—the stored carbon is released back into the atmosphere as planet-warming carbon dioxide. Scientists, however, don’t know exactly how much of the greenhouse gas trees are pulling from the atmosphere, and thus forests’ precise role in the carbon cycle—and how that will change on a warming planet—remains ambiguous.
Cue Biomass. Since the satellite is still in its commissioning phase, these early images don’t shed light on carbon storage just yet, but they do provide an unprecedented view of Earth’s landscapes. The image above showcases the Beni River in Bolivia, a country that has experienced widespread deforestation. Each color represents a different aspect of the landscape—greens are mostly rainforest, reds are forested floodplains and wetlands, blues and purples are grasslands and black represents rivers and lakes.
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The next image marks the very first snapshot Biomass beamed back to its team on Earth, and it features the Amazon rainforest in northern Brazil. The fact that the satellite can image wetlands—represented in pinks and reds in the bottom half of the image—emphasizes its ability to penetrate the thick canopy and investigate the forest floor.
“We’ll be looking at dense forests through completely new lenses,” Nuno Carvalhais, project manager at the Biomass project office from the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, said in a statement back in April. The P-band radar “enables us to see deeper into forest canopies than ever before and thus estimate biomass, and its changes, much more precisely.”
The mission will allow scientists to study landscapes beyond more than just forests, however. The image below, for example, showcases part of the Sahara Desert’s Tibesti Mountains in Chad. Researchers expect the P-band radar signals to penetrate up to 16.4 feet of dry sand. This means Biomass has the potential to map sub-surface geological features in deserts, including ancient riverbeds and lakes. Similarly, the satellite’s radar will also be able to pierce through ice to shed light on its internal structure.
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Despite these abilities, however, the mission’s main objective remains leafy.
“We fully expect that this new mission will provide a groundbreaking leap in our ability to understand Earth’s forests,” Cheli says in an ESA statement, “combining cutting-edge radar technology with the scientific excellence that will unlock vital insights into carbon storage, climate change and the health of our planet’s precious forest ecosystems.”
