Breaking new ground in mapping human settlements from space -The Global Urban Footprint-

Today 7.2 billion people inhabit the Earth and by 2050 this number will have risen to around nine billion, of which about 70 percent will be living in cities. Hence, it is essential to understand drivers, dynamics, and impacts of the human settlements development. A key component in this context is the availability of an up-to-date and spatially consistent map of the location and distribution of human settlements. It is here that the Global Urban Footprint (GUF) raster map can make a valuable contribution. The new global GUF binary settlement mask shows a so far unprecedented spatial resolution of 0.4 arcsec ($\sim12 m$) that provides - for the first time - a complete picture of the entirety of urban and rural settlements. The GUF has been derived by means of a fully automated processing framework - the Urban Footprint Processor (UFP) - that was used to analyze a global coverage of more than 180,000 TanDEM-X and TerraSAR-X radar images with 3m ground resolution collected in 2011-2012. Various quality assessment studies to determine the absolute GUF accuracy based on ground truth data on the one hand and the relative accuracies compared to established settlements maps on the other hand, clearly indicate the added value of the new global GUF layer, in particular with respect to the representation of rural settlement patterns. Generally, the GUF layer achieves an overall absolute accuracy of about 85\%, with observed minima around 65\% and maxima around 98 \%. The GUF will be provided open and free for any scientific use in the full resolution and for any non-profit (but also non-scientific) use in a generalized version of 2.8 arcsec ($\sim84m$). Therewith, the new GUF layer can be expected to break new ground with respect to the analysis of global urbanization and peri-urbanization patterns, population estimation or vulnerability assessment

New Enabling Technologies to Observe and Characterise Urban Environments with Big Data from Space – the Urban Thematic Exploitation Platform

Modern Earth Observation (EO) satellite missions provide valuable opportunities to support sustainable urban planning and management by delivering dedicated information on the spatiotemporal development of the built environment and its key morphological and physical characteristics such as imperviousness, greenness, built-up density, building volume, albedo – from global down to local scale. However, the transformation of the raw EO imagery into ready-to-use thematic data and indicators for scientist or planners on the one hand and actionable information for decision makers on the other hand requires detailed technical expert knowledge. Moreover, the imagery collected by satellite missions such as the US Landsat program or the European fleet of Sentinel satellites, but also by airborne systems or drones, rapidly adds up to a multiple of the data volume that can effectively be handled with standard work stations and software solutions. Hence, this contribution introduces the Urban Thematic Exploitation Platform (https://urban-tep.eo.esa.int) that utilizes modern information and communication technology to bridge the gap between the mass data collections of the technology-driven EO sector and the demand of science, planning, and policy for up-to-date information on the status, properties and dynamics of the urban system. Key components of the Urban Thematic Exploitation Platform (U-TEP) are an open, web-based portal that is connected to distributed high-level computing clusters and clouds and that also provides key functionalities for i) high-performance data access, analysis and visualization, ii) customized development and sharing of algorithms, products and services, and iii) networking, communication and exchange of data and information. The overarching objective here is to enable any interested (non-expert) user to easily generate actionable indicators and information for effective sustainable urban development based on a joint analysis of various data sources such as official survey data, EO mission data, socio-economic statistics, and data collected via social media or citizen science. So far more than 3.5 PB of data have been processed and analyzed by means of the U-TEP to finally provide a broad spectrum of urban information products and related services for visualization and analytics that have yet successfully been used by more than 240 institutions (science, planning, NGOs, policy) from 41 countries (i.a. World Bank Group, United Nations, Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, World Food Programme, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Group on Earth Observation, Global Platform for Sustainable Cities)

Anthropogenic Heat Flux Estimation from Space: Results of the first phase of the URBANFLUXES Project

H2020-Space project URBANFLUXES (URBan ANthrpogenic heat FLUX from Earth observation Satellites) investigates the potential of Copernicus Sentinels to retrieve anthropogenic heat flux, as a key component of the Urban Energy Budget (UEB). URBANFLUXES advances the current knowledge of the impacts of UEB fluxes on urban heat island and consequently on energy consumption in cities. This will lead to the development of tools and strategies to mitigate these effects, improving thermal comfort and energy efficiency. In URBANFLUXES, the anthropogenic heat flux is estimated as a residual of UEB. Therefore, the rest UEB components, namely, the net all-wave radiation, the net change in heat storage and the turbulent sensible and latent heat fluxes are independently estimated from Earth Observation (EO), whereas the advection term is included in the error of the anthropogenic heat flux estimation from the UEB closure. The project exploits Sentinels observations, which provide improved data quality, coverage and revisit times and increase the value of EO data for scientific work and future emerging applications. These observations can reveal novel scientific insights for the detection and monitoring of the spatial distribution of the urban energy budget fluxes in cities, thereby generating new EO opportunities. URBANFLUXES thus exploits the European capacity for space-borne observations to enable the development of operational services in the field of urban environmental monitoring and energy efficiency in cities. H2020-Space project URBANFLUXES (URBan ANthrpogenic heat FLUX from Earth observation Satellites)investigates the potential of Copernicus Sentinels to retrieve anthropogenic heat flux, as a key component of the UrbanEnergy Budget (UEB). URBANFLUXES advances the current knowledge of the impacts of UEB fluxes on urban heatisland and consequently on energy consumption in cities. This will lead to the development of tools and strategies tomitigate these effects, improving thermal comfort and energy efficiency. In URBANFLUXES, the anthropogenic heatflux is estimated as a residual of UEB. Therefore, the rest UEB components, namely, the net all-wave radiation, the netchange in heat storage and the turbulent sensible and latent heat fluxes are independently estimated from EarthObservation (EO), whereas the advection term is included in the error of the anthropogenic heat flux estimation from theUEB closure. The project exploits Sentinels observations, which provide improved data quality, coverage and revisittimes and increase the value of EO data for scientific work and future emerging applications. These observations canreveal novel scientific insights for the detection and monitoring of the spatial distribution of the urban energy budgetfluxes in cities, thereby generating new EO opportunities. URBANFLUXES thus exploits the European capacity forspace-borne observations to enable the development of operational services in the field of urban environmentalmonitoring and energy efficiency in cities

Measurement of the production of a W boson in association with a charm quark in pp collisions at √s = 7 TeV with the ATLAS detector

The production of a W boson in association with a single charm quark is studied using 4.6 fb−1 of pp collision data at s√ = 7 TeV collected with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. In events in which a W boson decays to an electron or muon, the charm quark is tagged either by its semileptonic decay to a muon or by the presence of a charmed meson. The integrated and differential cross sections as a function of the pseudorapidity of the lepton from the W-boson decay are measured. Results are compared to the predictions of next-to-leading-order QCD calculations obtained from various parton distribution function parameterisations. The ratio of the strange-to-down sea-quark distributions is determined to be 0.96+0.26−0.30 at Q 2 = 1.9 GeV2, which supports the hypothesis of an SU(3)-symmetric composition of the light-quark sea. Additionally, the cross-section ratio σ(W + +c¯¯)/σ(W − + c) is compared to the predictions obtained using parton distribution function parameterisations with different assumptions about the s−s¯¯¯ quark asymmetry

Search for direct production of charginos and neutralinos in events with three leptons and missing transverse momentum in √s = 7 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for the direct production of charginos and neutralinos in final states with three electrons or muons and missing transverse momentum is presented. The analysis is based on 4.7 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data delivered by the Large Hadron Collider and recorded with the ATLAS detector. Observations are consistent with Standard Model expectations in three signal regions that are either depleted or enriched in Z-boson decays. Upper limits at 95% confidence level are set in R-parity conserving phenomenological minimal supersymmetric models and in simplified models, significantly extending previous results