Many earth-observing missions, with sensors covering spectral regions from ultraviolet to infrared, have been developed and utilized for studies of changes in the Earth's land, oceans, atmosphere, and their interactions. These missions include the U.S. NASA's Earth Observing System (EOS) missions, the Suomi-National Polar-orbiting Partnership (S-NPP) mission, the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM), the NOAA's Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite (POES) series, the ESA's MetOp A and B missions, the JAXA's Greenhouse gases Observing SATellite (GOSAT) and Advanced Land Observation Satellite (ALOS), the Indian Remote Sensing (IRS) satellite series, the South Korean Communication, Ocean and Meteorological Satellite (COMS), and the China's FY-1, -2, and -3 satellite series. Successful operations of these missions and their applications have significantly contributed to recent progress of the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), which is being built as a public infrastructure interconnecting a diverse and growing array of instruments and systems for monitoring and forecasting changes in the global environment. Meanwhile, with technology advancements and design improvements, various follow-on and new missions are currently underway throughout the world, such as the U.S. Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) missions, the next generation of Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-R series (GOES-R), ESA's MetOp, Sentinel, and Earth Explorer missions, JAXA's Global Change Observation Missions (GCOM), ALOS-2, GOSAT-2, the joint ESA/JAXA EarthCARE mission, the joint NASA/JAXA GPM mission, and the next generation of China's FY satellite series. In addition to these research and operational missions, many efforts and advances have been made for the development of commercial and low-cost small satellites. As more and more satellite observations and data products are made available to the science and user community, high quality calibration and characterization of individual sensors and accurate determination of their calibration consistency have become increasingly important and demanding. The establishment of CEOS reference standard test sites, development of a Quality Assurance Framework for Earth Observation (QA4EO) and the effort by the Global Space-based Inter-calibration System (GSICS) are such examples. It is the purpose of this conference to provide an international forum to exchange information and promote discussion over a broad range of challenging topics concerning earth-observing mission and sensor development, technology implementation, new test equipment design, sensor calibration and characterization, performance verification, and data analysis techniques focusing on but not limited to wavelength regions from the ultraviolet through near-infrared