GEO/CEOS
Welcome to the UK Joint GEO/CEOS Office
The UK’s Joint GEO/CEOS Office is hosted by NCEO, on behalf of the UK Earth Observation community, to interface to two major international initiatives: the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) and the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS).
GEO is a voluntary partnership of governments and organisations working towards user-driven Earth intelligence solutions that inform decisions and accelerate action on global, societal and environmental challenges, leveraging its unique position as an established intergovernmental body with a strong and inclusive partnership.
CEOS is a mechanism to coordinate civil space-based EO programmes and promote data exchange for society’s benefit, and to inform decision-making to secure a prosperous and sustainable future for humankind.
Alongside DSIT (GEO Policy lead) and the UK Space Agency (CEOS Policy lead), NCEO is working to increase the visibility of GEO to the UK Earth Observation community, facilitating and coordinating the UK’s inputs to GEO and CEOS. We disseminate information about CEOS and GEO activities, get community feedback, and host GEO and CEOS events in the UK. The joint GEO/CEOS office is funded by DSIT, NERC/NCEO, and the UK Space Agency.
Satellites are particularly useful because they can collect data from across the globe every month, week or even day.
Further information & key documents for UK community relating to GEO and CEOS
GEO 2023-2025 Work Programme
Each GEO Work Programme covers a fixed three-year period. The latest programme was approved by the GEO-18 Plenary in Ghana on 3 November 2022 and contains description of GEO Flagships, Initiatives, Pilot Initiatives and Regional GEOs.
The full programme and a Summary document can be downloaded from the GEO website.
GEO Knowledge Hub
Access to Earth Observation (EO) Applications developed by the GEO Work Programme Activities is through the GEO Knowledge Hub (GKH), a central cloud-based digital library which helps the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) to advance Open Knowledge. GKH is part of the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) infrastructure.
GEO and data sharing
The joint UK GEO/CEOS Office has supported work to share metadata for UK EO datasets stored on data.gov.uk to the GEOSS data portal. 23,458 UK metadata records are being harvested to the GEOSS data portal, including numerous NCEO datasets available on CEDA. These records are shared as Open Data by default and are available as part of the GEOSS Data Collection of Open Resources for Everyone (Data-CORE).
Important GEO and CEOs Events in 2024/2024
- 38th CEOS Plenary: October 22nd – 24th, 2024 | Montreal, Canada
- GEO Global Forum “The Earth Talks”: May 5th – 9th, 2025 | Rome, Italy
- 39th CEOS Plenary: November 4th – 6th, 2025 | Bath, UK
About us
DSIT supplies the UK policy lead for GEO; NCEO provides the science lead for GEO on behalf of NERC; the UK Space Agency provides the UK space link for GEO and interfaces to the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS).
Keep in Touch
Subscribe to the mailing list for the latest news and events from GEO and CEOS.
Contact Svetlana Zolotikova (NCEO International Project Coordinator) for further info.
Government and Space Agencies
NCEO works with the UK Space Agency, the European Space Agency (ESA), Eumetsat, the EC Copernicus programme and NASA to support high quality science.
NCEO has the responsibility, on behalf of NERC, to convey the needs and aspirations of the whole NERC community to the UK Space Agency and to ESA in which the UK invests to support environmental science from space.
