ECOSTRESS November Community Updates Digest

November 2025

Dear ECOSTRESS Community,

We hope this message finds you well! We're excited to share recent publications, upcoming events, and updates from the ECOSTRESS community.

Your work and engagement continue to demonstrate the mission's value across diverse applications—from wildfire prediction to urban planning to agricultural water management.

Best regards,

The ECOSTRESS Team
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

California Institute of Technology

🎉 Announcements

ECOSTRESS has now acquired over 580,000 scenes since the completion of In Orbit Checkout! This incredible achievement continues to provide the highest spatial resolution thermal measurements available from space at 70m resolution.

Your feedback is invited – NASA’s EarthRISE Urban Heat Needs Assessment: Our colleagues at NASA’s EarthRISE are conducting a needs assessment of city-level organizations that address urban heat to better understand the role of Earth observation satellite data in heat-related decision-making in U.S. cities. Their goal is to gather feedback that can be used to make satellite data more useful to organizations like yours.  They invite the ECOSTRESS community to complete a short questionnaire, which should only take about 10-15 minutes to complete.  Please visit:  https://uah.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_bwrmAjXpzuWeZka. 

At the end of the questionnaire, there will be an option to provide your email address if you are interested in being contacted for a follow-up interview.  Please contact Betzy Hernandez (betzy.hernandez@nasa.gov) with any questions.

📚 Recent Publications

Sanna, A., Chamberlain, C., Prichard, S.J. et al. (2025). "Assessing fuel treatments and burn severity using global and local analyses." Fire Ecology, 21, 44. https://doi.org/10.1186/s42408-025-00387-y

Cooley, S. S., Keller, M., Longo, M., Csillik, O., Dias, A. P., Silgueiro, V., ... & Menge, D. N. (2025). "Thermal stress in degraded forests in the Brazilian Amazon Arc of Deforestation." Environmental Research Letters, 20(8), 084069.  https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/adea98 

Rabuffi, F., Hulley, G., Hook, S. J., Cawse-Nicholson, K., Ramsey, M. S., Thompson, J. O., ... & La, T. T. (2025). "Surface Mineralogy using Thermal InfraRed Spectroscopy Data from ECOSTRESS and ASTER." IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters.  doi: 10.1109/LGRS.2025.3625069

🌐 COMING SOON - New ECOSTRESS Website Feature: Applications

We're excited to announce that we are revamping the Applications section on the ECOSTRESS website, coming soon!

This dedicated section will showcase real-world applications of ECOSTRESS data across various domains including agriculture, urban planning, wildfire management, ecosystem monitoring, and more.

What will be featured:

  • Case studies from practitioners and stakeholders
  •  Success stories of ECOSTRESS data implementation
  • Applications tutorials and best practices
  •  Links to tools and resources for specific use cases

If you're using ECOSTRESS data in applied settings or working

with end-users, we'd love to feature your work. Please reach out to share your application stories and help build this resource for the community.

🌍 Upcoming Event

International Workshop on High-Resolution Thermal Earth Observations

November 18-20, 2025 | Toulouse, France

Join the ECOSTRESS community and thermal remote sensing researchers from around the world at this important workshop. This is an excellent opportunity to learn about the latest advances in high-resolution thermal observations and network with colleagues working on thermal missions including ECOSTRESS, TRISHNA, SBG, and LSTM.

American Geophysical Union

December 15-19, 2025 | New Orleans, LA

ECOSTRESS presentations and posters at AGU – please feel free to add in your talk!

ECOSTRESS AGU 2025 talks

🔬 Data Product Updates 

Collection 3 Processing is underway!

Forward processing began in October 2025, and reprocessing will begin after preliminary validation of the forward processing.

  • Improved geolocation: Correction to timestamp calculation using ISS positional data
  • Striping reduction: ECOSTRESS launched with damage to one of its elements causing systematic striping in bands 1 and 5. New advanced ML-based interpolation code offers an improved and more accurate gap-filling (use the quality flags if you don’t want to include this data in science analysis). In addition, random striping in all bands has been reduced. 
  • Tiled data sampling: The appearance of the checkerboard effect is improved with bilinear resampling of overlapping scanlines
  • Evapotranspiration Products: Updates have been applied to the STIC and BESS models, resulting in improved output
  • Improved band-to-band registration: camera model updated resulting in improved band-to-band misregistration, resulting in improved data fidelity.
  • New Sea Surface Temperature(SST) product: Included with the L2 product and valid over all ocean and inland water body surfaces using a view-angle dependent SW algorithm.
  • More reliable and accurate L2 cloud mask: Higher resolution simulation modeling, and wider range of atmospheric conditions modeled. 

Collection 2 Performance Validation: Recent studies confirm significant improvements in ECOSTRESS Collection 2 products:

  • LST Accuracy: The cold bias present in Collection 1 (approximately -2K between 270-300K) has been effectively corrected in Collection 2, with bias reduced to near 0K
  • Evapotranspiration Products: Multi-model ensemble achieves RMSE of 106 W/m² for instantaneous observations and 1.2 mm/day for daily retrievals
  • Enhanced Cloud Masking: Improved consistency across Level 2 and Level 3 products
  • Transparent Forcing Data: All ET model inputs (NDVI, albedo, reanalysis data) now publicly available via the ECOSTRESS GitHub

 

Monthly ECOSTRESS ET Composites: 🚧 In Development 🚧 

  • Western US Monthly ET Composites: Starting with California, Oregon and Washington. We plan to produce a composited, quality-screened monthly composites using the tiled JET-ET product to start (want other products composited? Let us know!). These products will be released with harmonized GEDI Canopy Height for analyses. Please reach out to madeleine.pascolini-campbell@jpl.nasa.gov & glynn.hulley@jpl.nasa.gov w/questions!

 

📢 Share Your Work!

We want to hear from you! If you have recent work using ECOSTRESS data, please share:

  • Recent publications or preprints
  • Conference presentations or posters
  • Applications work with practitioners and stakeholders
  • Field campaigns or validation studies
  • Student research or dissertations
  • Real-world implementations affecting policy or management decisions

 

Please consider using the attached format to submit your highlights, and we'll feature them in upcoming community updates. 

🔗 Resources

  • ECOSTRESS Website: https://ecostress.jpl.nasa.gov
  • Data Access (AppEEARS): https://appeears.earthdatacloud.nasa.gov/
  • Collection 2 Code: https://github.com/ECOSTRESS-Collection-2
  • Join the Community of Practice: Submit the form on the ECOSTRESS website to access our Slack group and receive updates https://ecostress.jpl.nasa.gov/news/join-the-ecostress-slack-channel-and-community-of-practice

Fuel treatment

Tree mortality

Surface Mineralogy