Satellite Eye for the Galathea 3 ship expedition: Global tour 2006-2007

Satellite Eye for Galathea 3 (www.satellitecye.dk contains education at the internet for secondary and upper secondary schools and the public. The Galathea 3 ship expedition circumnavigated the globe starting from Denmark 11 August 2006, visiting Greenland, Azores, South Africa, Australia, Solomon Islands, New Zealand, Antarctica, Chile, Galapagos, the Caribbean, the Northeastern USA and finishing in Denmark 25 April 2007.

During the entire expedition satellite images were ordered along the ship track, downloaded, processed, archived and used for education. The satellite images are displayed in Google Earth along with 10 minute observations of air and sea parameters observed at the ship (http://galathca.oersted.dtu.dk).

This material forms basis for 9 running projects along the entire route and 24 site-specific cases. Observations. from several science projects onboard will be used in the site-specific cases. One of the continuous study cases is chlorophyll observed from Envisat MERIS. As an example: in the upwelling zone near Namibia a very high level of chlorophyll was observed from MERIS.

The ship route consequently was changed slightly the day after in order to traverse the area with the highest amount of chlorophyll. Chlorophyll observed onboard (in-situ) two days later show high amounts. In addition, in the science project on the carbon cycle a significant emission of CO2 was observed.

The students can use the data online in the classroom. Students from several classes were onboard for part of the expedition and these classes in particular used the Satellite Eye teaching material. In Google Earth satellite images of many themes are shown. These include sea ice, sea surface temperature, ocean wind, wave height, sea surface level, ozone, clouds and radar images of ocean and land.

Also high spatial resolution land cover mapping of the visited harbors and their surroundings are included. The case studies uses the image processing software LEOWorks developed through the ESA project EDUSPACE, the European Earth Observation web site for Secondary Schools (http://www.eduspace.esa.int.

For each theme a thorough educational material has been developed in Danish and English. ESA has granted a large amount of Envisat as well as PROBA images and third mission data from SPOT and Landsat. Also data from NOAA, NASA, JAXA and QUICKBIRD were used.