What Copernicus Is and What You Can Find on copernicus.eu

Updated

Copernicus is the European Union's Earth observation programme, and copernicus.eu is its public web presence. The most important thing to know before you start: the main www.copernicus.eu site is now an archive. It still holds service information, the services catalogue, thematic hub pages, use cases and an image gallery, but current news items such as the Copernicus Image of the Day and the EU Space Observer are published on the new EU Space website. Use copernicus.eu when you want background on the programme and its services; go to the EU Space site for the latest editorial content.

What the programme provides

Copernicus supplies environmental data and information products built on Earth observation, including data from the Copernicus Sentinel satellites. The programme is organised into services, each covering a domain:

Service Domain it covers
Atmosphere Atmospheric composition and related monitoring
Marine Ocean and marine environment
Land Land cover, land use and terrestrial monitoring
Climate Change Climate data and indicators
Security Security-related monitoring and surveillance
Emergency Emergency and disaster response

The site also links to thematic hubs that package Copernicus data around specific user communities: Health, Coastal, Energy, Arctic and World Heritage. Each hub is a centralised entry point — for example, the Coastal Hub offers open and free access to a selection of coastal Earth observation data from the Sentinel satellites and all Copernicus Services, while the Heritage Hub supports monitoring and management of cultural and natural heritage sites.

What you can actually do on the site

  • Browse the services catalogue. The catalogue contains a comprehensive list of information products relevant to the various Copernicus services — the practical starting point if you need to find out whether a product exists for your topic.
  • Read use cases. These show the programme applied to real problems. One documented example: after clumps of solidified vegetable oil were found along a 25 km stretch of coastline on Finland's Hanko Peninsula in January 2025, Finnish authorities used drift modelling to investigate whether the substance came from a passing vessel's cargo tank wash. Another describes COSNORTH-SEMAR, a decision-support system for maritime surveillance, law enforcement, search operations and pollution control.
  • Explore thematic hubs for domain-specific data access and interactive maps.
  • View the image gallery, including the archived Image of the Day — for instance, a 26/04/2026 image of Monaco's urbanised coast between the Maritime Alps and the sea, tagged to Land and Cities.
  • Read archived Observer articles on topics such as the 2025 EU fire season, space weather events, CLMS and carbon removal monitoring, and IRIS2.

Where to go for what

You need Go to
Current news, Image of the Day, EU Space Observer The new EU Space website
Product listings across services Copernicus services catalogue on copernicus.eu
Domain-specific data access Thematic hubs (Health, Coastal, Energy, Arctic, Heritage)
Practical examples of the programme in use Use cases section
Background on the programme and its services copernicus.eu archive pages

Practical notes

The site describes access to hub data selections as open and free; it does not publish pricing for the programme's services, so treat any specific product's terms as something to confirm at the point of access. If you arrive looking for this week's news and find only dated archive entries, that is expected behaviour rather than a broken link — follow the pointer to the EU Space website instead.