According to the Copernicus Global Land Service (2024), land surface temperature (LST) anomalies in Europe have shown an average rise of 0.4°C per decade since 1981, with increasingly frequent and intense heatwaves impacting both ecosystems and agriculture. The European Ecostress hub provide critical data, improving water management and agricultural resilience.

The European Ecostress Hub supports the upcoming Copernicus Land Surface Temperature Monitoring (LSTM) mission by building a robust data access and evaluation platform around NASA’s ECOSTRESS observations.

At the heart of the project is the operationalisation of ECOSTRESS data over Europe and Africa, made available to users via a dedicated platform offering scene and area selection, the choice of retrieval methods and parametrisations, and access to auxiliary datasets. The system is tailored to serve both scientific and operational users who need timely, high-resolution thermal observations for land monitoring and agriculture.

During the most recent reporting period, the EEH team completed the multi-site temporal integration analysis for converting instantaneous ECOSTRESS observations into daily evapotranspiration (ET) estimates—critical for water resource management and stress detection. The team is now refining the analysis further for improved accuracy across different land cover types and climate zones.

The project also provides a thorough performance assessment of ECOSTRESS retrievals under diverse scene conditions: crop type variation, vegetation growth stages, and climatic gradients (tropical, dry, temperate, and continental). These insights will feed into the preparation activities for the future LSTM mission, ensuring better calibration, algorithm readiness, and use-case definition.