CEReS

• April 1963 Institute of Natural Color Technology (INCT) was established in Faculty of Engineering
  
  April 1976 Division of Remote Sensing Image Processing was established in INCT
  
  April 1986 INCT was reorganized to Remote Sensing and Image Research Center (RSIRC) as an independent center in Chiba University
  
  April 1995　RSIRC was reorganized and expanded to Center for Environmental Remote Sensing (CEReS) as a joint research center open to all universities. Composed of three-division programs and one development and operations department.
  
  April 2004 All national universities including Chiba University have been changed to “National University Corporations” and reorganized to two research areas and Satellite Data Processing Office.
  
  April 2010 CEReS was authorized as “Joint Usage / Research Center” by Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT)
  
  April 2017 The Department of Environmental Remote Sensing,comprising researchers of the Center for Environmental Remote Sensing (CEReS), was newly established in Chiba University
  
  October 2021 The structure of three-division programs reorganized to five-division programs.
  
  October 2025 We will reorganize to eleven-division programs.

The importance of global environmental issues is no longer confined to the academic world; it is widely recognized by people around the world and has increasingly significant social and economic impacts. In conducting large-scale Earth observation, analysis using satellite data has become an indispensable tool.
Satellite data are extremely useful as images, but when a certain level of accuracy is guaranteed, their importance as data for scientific analysis continues to grow. Already, through correlation with various ground-based observations, satellite data have been directly or indirectly applied to many issues, including global warming, changes in polar regions, disaster monitoring, desertification, vegetation assessment, and atmospheric environmental problems.
Even today, with the widespread development of computers, processing and archiving the vast amounts of satellite data remains an enormous task. Moreover, the range of environmental topics that can utilize satellite data is extremely diverse. In this context, the activities of CEReS as a “Comprehensive Environmental Information Hub”—processing, archiving, and providing satellite and related ground observation data, and promoting their scientific use through a wide range of related research—make significant contributions not only to researchers at domestic institutions but also to researchers across Asia and worldwide, advancing studies on the global environment.
Furthermore, as a nationwide open-use and collaborative research center affiliated with Chiba University, CEReS works closely with graduate education to cultivate the next generation of experts in this field.

Against this backdrop, CEReS holds the following missions as a core research institution in remote sensing:

• To conduct advanced research in remote sensing

• To advance studies on Earth surface environmental changes using remote sensing data

• To conduct research that applies remote sensing for societal benefit