ESA's Envisat mission continued and expanded upon the legacy of its predecessors, the ERS (European Remote Sensing) satellites. Operating between 2002 and 2012, the satellite's 10 instruments acquired a decade of data for many applications.

One of the satellite's instruments was the Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS), which acquired measurements of ocean colour, and later broadened its scope to atmospheric and terrestrial applications.

The archive of data products for MERIS is freely available to download to anyone with an account in ESA's EO Sign In system. One of the available collections is for Full Resolution Level-1 data, which contains Top of Atmosphere upwelling spectral radiance measurements. The current version of the dataset uses a Sentinel-3-like format.

MERIS Level-1 Full Resolution products support applications related to atmospheric processes, clouds, water vapour, and aerosols, climate studies, and meteorology.