Japan Geoscience Union

Today the satellite observation systems are indispensably important for producing global and regional data sets that are used in scientific research and services of every life like weather forecasting. With increasing public concerns on the issues of climate change and environmental problems, a tight collaboration between space agencies and meteorological agencies have been promoted internationally. Each sectors of the world are making effort to establish geostationary and polar orbiter satellite systems to contribute to such coordination as in the plans by CEOS and WMO. Japanese contributions have been and are expected to be important in this international coordination, because of the advanced technologies producing unique and useful data sets from, for example, GOSAT, GCOM-W, GPM, ALOS-2, Himawari-8 and future GCOM-C, EarthCARE, GOSAT-2, and High resolution imagers. In this talk, we like to discuss the current issues of the earth observation and present ideas for future satellite system planning.