FLEX user workshop 2025 - A community comes together

Our second FLEX user workshop took place on March 11, 2025. Once again, representatives from ESA, DLR and the FLEX user community came together to discuss the current status of the FLEX mission - both the challenges and the potential.

At the beginning of our event, the user community was brought up to date on the current status of the FLEX mission. To this end, Ralf Bock and Matthias Drusch from ESA presented the status of the FLEX satellite. Subsequently, Roberto Colombo (University of Milano Bicocca) opened the insight into the current Cal/Val plan of the mission. This first session ended with an introduction by Paul Näthe (JB Hyperspectral Devices GmbH) to the various JB measurement systems and their innovations, and in particular the possibility of using the FloX boxes as a validation network.

However, the focus of the workshop was on the active user community: nine experts from various research areas presented their work and showed how their topics are linked to the FLEX mission.

Astrid Bracher from the Alfred Wegener Institute gave exciting insights into the possible applications of FLEX data in aquatic research. Sebastian Preidl (Julius Kühn Institute) and Eva Pfannerstill (Forschungszentrum Jülich) gave insights into their research on the topic of forests. Carbon research was also strongly represented: Simon de Canniere (University of Antwerp) and Luis Alonso (CEAM) presented the ICOS network, while Gregory Duveiller (Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry Jena) reported on current developments in carbon modeling. Mirco Migliavacca (JRC-ISPRA), on the other hand, opened up the perspective of how SIF data can be used as a source of information for forest and carbon cycle modeling in the context of EU legislation. Further perspectives came from Sebastian van der Linden (University of Greifswald), who highlighted the importance of peatlands, and Anna Göritz (University of Freiburg), who presented approaches to quantifying and modeling ecosystems. Sebastian Garrigues (ECMWF) also gave an outlook on the Integrated Forecast System (IFS) and the EU project CONCERTO.

Finally, the user community discussed the opportunities that FLEX can offer for the research areas presented, but also its limitations. It became clear that FLEX has been received with great gratitude by the community and that the launch is eagerly awaited. In addition, the user community is open to the challenges and limitations and is willing to develop solutions for discrepancies in spatial or temporal resolutions, for example, and also to become active in the area of calibration and validation.