Copernicus Programme

Last year was the planet's hottest on record by a substantial margin and likely the world's warmest in the last 100,000 years, the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said on Tuesday.

The fire in Evros, located in northeastern Greece, had consumed an area exceeding 82,600 hectares until August 28. This information is based on the latest high-resolution images obtained from the Sentinel-2 satellite and analyzed by the National Observatory of Forest Fires (NOFFi)'s burnt areas mapping service.

The Hellenic Space Center (HSC) signed a deal on Thursday with local firm TotalView that will give state agencies access to high-quality satellite images - superior to the EU's Copernicus program - that they can use to track wildfires and gauge their aftermath, capture environmental violations, help map property lines, assess farmers' compensation claims and much more. 

Europe experienced its second-warmest year on record in 2022, European Union scientists said on Tuesday, as climate change unleashed record-breaking weather extremes that slashed crop yields, dried up rivers and led to thousands of deaths.

Land surface temperatures reached a staggering 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) in Turkey and on Cyprus island, a map released on Aug. 3 by the European Space Agency (ESA) showed.

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The ESA shared the map showing sea and land surface temperatures that were captured by Copernicus Sentinel-3 satellites on Aug. 2.

Google Earth users can now see the striking effect of climate change over the past four decades.

Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras this week heralded the creation of a new national emergency service in the wake of last month's deadly wildfires in Attica, but in fact Greece already has an expert agency that has for years been offering its expertise via Copernicus, the European Union's Earth observation program - chiefly to other countries though.