Held between 2 and 6 December 2024, at ESA’s Earth Observation centre in Frascati, Italy, the fifth edition of ESA’s Very High-Resolution Radar & Optical Data Assessment workshop reached new levels of success.

Building on the achievements of the past four editions, this latest VH-RODA workshop provided an open forum for participants to discuss current and future data quality and Calibration-Validation (Cal/Val) activities, related to very high resolution (VHR) optical, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and, for the first time, atmospheric data and products.

It brought together New Space companies, world-renowned experts and various International Space/Research Agencies (ESA, ASI, CNES, UKSA, NASA, USGS, CSIRO, EC-JRC).

The workshop featured 16 sessions with a record number of 262 registered attendees – of whom 172 in-person participants – 87 abstracts received, 63 oral presentations covered, 23 posters. For the first time, it also hosted a Vendors Exhibit with 10 vendors throughout the five days, as well as three Training Sessions, highly appreciated by the community.

VH-RODA reaffirmed itself as one of the most important Earth Observation (EO) Data Quality and Cal/Val workshops in the world, further demonstrating strategic relevance of ESA projects within the international Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) context and beyond.

Representatives from the Copernicus Contributing Missions (CCM) programme, which provide commercial data to the Copernicus Services for operational applications, also attended the event. Cooperation between Commercial and Institutional Space Agencies was greatly appreciated, and in particular, the Earthnet Data Assessment Project (EDAP), and CCM activities with the Mission Performance Clusters were reported as key elements of this cooperation—some key highlights from VH-RODA 2024 are here summarised:

The coordination between ESA and NASA with regards to the Data Quality framework was very positively perceived and deemed as very efficient; USGS expressed keen interest in joining efforts to further improve the ESA-NASA framework/guidelines.

CEOS-Fiducial Reference Measurements (with a strong ESA programme) are now well established and defined as international references for post-launch satellite Cal/Val for many different applications. The new CEOS QA framework facilitates transparent and consistent assessment of compliance to community agreed criteria.

The Traceable Radiometry Underpinning Terrestrial- and Helio-Studies mission, or TRUTHS, is expected to become an absolute reference for data quality, considered as a ‘standards laboratory in space’, setting the ‘gold standard’ reference for climate measurements.

The Cal/Val Park and BAQUNIN (park for atmospheric Cal/Val) are now deemed as instrumental within the community. Cooperation with the US, India and Australia are to be organised and further developed, with a view to create a network of supersites. Further extension of Cal/Val facilities with portable instruments (like COCCON) in less-covered areas, for instance Africa, was requested.

As far as the “Towards Certification” topic, there were many interesting discussions where the EDAP Cal/Val Maturity Matrix, now operationally used within CCM and further developed within the context of the ESA-NASA framework, reaffirmed its potential applicability to underpin a potential EO Product Certification scheme.

Commercial providers that form part of ESA’s Third Party Missions (TPM) programme, which disseminates commercial data to the scientific community for research and development purposes, further strengthened ESA’s TPM coordination efforts and relationships with the Joint Agency Commercial Imagery Evaluation (JACIE) organisers and stakeholders (USGS, NASA etc.). This reaffirmed both VH-RODA (Europe) and JACIE (USA) as the two key workshops within the field of EO Data Quality and Cal/Val in the world.

Leonardo De Laurentiis, ESA's VHR data quality manager, stated, "The success of the fifth VH-RODA workshop is really a testament to the dedication and hard work of the whole EO Data Quality and Cal/Val community, as well as the incredible collaboration within the Organising Committee.

“I'm deeply grateful to my colleagues for their unwavering support and expertise. VH-RODA truly reflects the growing strength of our community and the increasing recognition of the importance of the EO Data Quality and Cal/Val domain. All together, we are not just advancing knowledge within the domain, but fostering a movement that will continue to make a meaningful impact towards a Global Earth Observation System of Systems."