Operational Lessons from the EnMAP Foreground Mission during teh ESA CaRMA Campain 2025

Kurzfassung

Launched on 1 April 2022, the Environmental Mapping and Analysis Program (EnMAP; www.enmap.org) has been providing high-quality spaceborne imaging spectroscopy data to the international scientific community for nearly four years. Since the start of routine operations in November 2022, user demand has grown rapidly, with more than 4,400 active users worldwide. Acquisition requests are spatially highly heterogeneous, with particularly strong demand over Europe. As a result, overlapping requests within individual orbits are common, limiting the feasibility of user-defined acquisitions and complicating the generation of consistent hyperspectral time series and spatial–temporal multi-sensor matchups. These challenges became especially apparent during coordinated campaign activities such as the ESA CaRMA 2025 campaign, which required frequent, cloud-free acquisitions and close synchronization with field and airborne measurements.