Published on 21 March 2023
What is ACEO?
ACEO is the senior advisory body to the Director of Earth Observation Programmes, acting as the Director General's representative, on all matters concerning Earth sciences included in ESA's Earth observation science programme. Its main tasks are to advise and/or make recommendations on a series of science-related activities and projects, including the formulation and updating of the medium- and long-term Earth Observation Science Strategy in Europe, the selection (and extension) and formulation of future Earth observation missions, the impact of Space 4.0 (including New Space) on ESA Earth observation programmes, and the contribution of ESA Earth observation missions to address major societal issues, among many others.
Our STEREO pride
Prof. Gabriëlle De Lannoy is professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at KU Leuven (Bioscience Engineering, Belgium). Earlier, she worked as a senior research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (USA). She is an expert in land surface modeling, satellite-based Earth observation and data assimilation, and won several prestigious awards for her research.
Her team currently focusses on active and passive microwave remote sensing for multi-scale soil moisture, vegetation and snow estimation, on peatland modeling and agricultural modeling, and on applications such as natural hazard estimation.
Dr. Else Swinnen is a senior Scientist in the Remote Sensing Unit at VITO, where she is R&D project manager of the Image Quality team focusing on the validation and improvement of remote sensing products.
Her research focus is on the definition of algorithms for the pre-processing of medium to low resolution sensors, the validation of various remote sensing products, the harmonization of time series from various optical sensors, and analysis of terrestrial ecosystem dynamics using time series of remotely sensed data.
And that isn't all! Among the 16 members of the ACEO is also Prof. Miguel Mahecha (Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, UFZ in Leipzig, Germany), the promotor of STEREO IV project HERMES under coordination of Diego Miralles, and Assoc. Prof. Luis Guanter (Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain) who is an old acquaintance of STEREO.
Did we say we are incredibly proud?