What is satellite data?

Scientific, economic and political knowledge about climate relies on satellite data.

How electromagnetic signals coming down from satellites are transformed into climate knowledge?

Sensors inside satellites collect light reflected and radiated from the Earth’s surface and atmosphere, converting it to digital intensities before transmitting them to the ground station -or the cloud.

How satellite data about the climate flows and is accessed over the world?

Data management is central to climate knowledge, also because the long-term scale requires data to be continuously revisited, corrected, reentered, reassessed and reanalyzed.

Why does a history of the practices involved in the production, circulation and use of satellite data matter?

Beyond being the epicenter of climate science, satellite data are also a matter of public policy and economic planning.

What is satellite data?

Scientific, economic and political knowledge about climate relies on satellite data.

Exploring the history of the production, circulation and use of climate satellite data

CLIMASAT is an ERC-StG funded project (n. 101042252) that investigates the sociotechnical and power-laden practices by which electromagnetic radiation detected in the orbits is turned into climate knowledge.

The project runs from 2022 to 2027 and is based at the Institut d’història de la ciència at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

 

Activities

Research

whats-climasat

CLIMASAT is an ERC-StG funded project (n. 101042252) that investigates the sociotechnical and power-laden practices by which electromagnetic radiation detected in the orbits is turned into climate knowledge.

The project runs from 2022 to 2027 and is based at the Institut d’història de la ciència at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

Activities

Research