Dry, warm weather has sparked wildfires over Siberia this spring. After a limited surge in April, the countryside has lit up majorly in May. But why is this happening and how can the Sentinel satellites help?

The European Union's Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellites are supplying unprecedented views of Earth, mainly providing information for agricultural and forestry practices and helping to manage food security. But how are they making a difference to farmers in particular?

Ice losses from Antarctica have tripled since 2012, increasing global sea levels by 0.12 inch (3 millimeters) in that timeframe alone, according to a major new international climate assessment funded by NASA and ESA (European Space Agency).

In a major collaborative effort, scientists from around the world have used information from satellites to reveal that ice melting in Antarctica has not only raised sea levels by 7.6 mm since 1992, but, critically, almost half of this rise has occurred in the last five years.

They say there is no gain without pain, but when the European Space Agency (Esa) set out in 2002 to develop its Aeolus satellite, no-one could have imagined the grief the project would bring.

A tropical cyclone formed in the Gulf of Aden between Yemen and northern Somalia on 16 May. On 19 May 2018, Tropical Cyclone Sagar-18 made landfall in Djibouti causing heavy rains and flash floods to surge in Djibouti city and Balbala suburb.

After a mild La Niña late last year, temperatures, convection and rainfall rates in the equatorial Pacific Ocean returned to normal by early April of this year. An 09 April image of sea level height from the U.S./European Jason-3 satellite mission showed most of the ocean at neutral heights. But by the beginning of May, high sea levels began to build up in the Central Pacific. In the tropics, high sea levels are usually caused by a layer of warm water at or below the surface.

It doesn't matter if it's a forest, a soybean field, or a prairie, all plants take up carbon dioxide during photosynthesis – the process where they use sunlight to convert water and carbon dioxide into food. During this changeover, the plants emit an energy "glow" that is not visible to the human eye, but can be detected by satellites in space.

Using a new algorithm, University of Illinois researchers may have found the solution to an age-old dilemma plaguing satellite imagery – whether to sacrifice high spatial resolution in the interest of generating images more frequently, or vice versa. The team's new tool eliminates this trade-off by fusing high-resolution and high-frequency satellite data into one integrated product, and can generate 30-meter daily continuous images going back to the year 2000.

Data from the first NASA satellite mission dedicated to measuring the water content of soils is now being used operationally by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to monitor global croplands and make commodity forecasts.

Hawaii's Kīlauea volcano has erupted again, causing an extensive explosion of sulphur dioxide and ash that could pose a risk to people's health and to aviation.

In what the UN describes as the world's fastest growing refugee crisis, almost 700,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled Myanmar for neighbouring Bangladesh since August 2017. With the Bangladesh government proposing a vulnerable low-lying island as a relocation site for thousands, Sentinel-1 data have shown how unsuitable this site would be.

Are night lights on earth captured by satellites from outer space a good way to measure inequality?

A new study shows that climate change is likely to intensify extreme weather events known as atmospheric rivers across most of the globe by the end of this century, while slightly reducing their number.

"Satellites beam to earth the equivalent of roughly 2 billion one-megapixel photographs every day. AI is the only thing that can let us see the whole world at once. Not recording it, but seeing it – creating a global real-time database of the world," says Stuart Russell, UC-Berkeley, lead of the AI for Good breakthrough team on AI and satellite imagery.

On 03 May, the Kilauea volcano on Hawaii's Big Island erupted from new fissures and sent lava flowing over streets and neighbourhoods. As the disaster response on the ground lead by the U.S. Geological Survey kicked into gear, managers from NASA's Earth Science Disasters Program heard from response agencies and sent out a call to NASA's own researchers, data managers, and satellite teams: What can we do to help?

Active for decades, Kīlauea volcano - on Hawaii's Big Island - erupted on 04 May. The island also experienced a magnitude 6.9 earthquake on the same day, forcing thousands to leave their homes.

In the weeks before Hurricane Harvey tore across the Gulf of Mexico and plowed into the Texas coast in August 2017, the Gulf's waters were warmer than any time on record, according to a new analysis.

Almost 30 years' worth of Landsat observations created a comprehensive inventory of catastrophic floods caused by glacial lakes bursting through their rock dams.

In March 2018, French scientists reported a steep decline in the country's bird populations, primarily as a result of agricultural activity. Causes include the increase in monoculture, detrimental land-use policies and, perhaps most importantly, the growth in the use of powerful pesticides such as neonicotinoids, which, by killing off insects, reduces the bird population by reducing the food available to them.