Level-2 News
ECMWF and Netherlands’ Deltares Use Case to develop a coastal forecasting and climate adaptation tool [link]
“Netherlands’ Deltares has signed a contract with the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) to develop tools for improved forecasting and climate adaptation, specifically designed for coastal areas, based on Destination Earth’s digital twins’ enhanced capabilities.”
Capella teams with analytics firms to promote use of radar imagery [link]
“Capella Space, a company that operates a constellation of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging satellites, is partnering with data analytics firms to help increase access to SAR imagery.
The first three companies to join Capella’s analytics partner program are Woolpert, an geospatial intelligence and strategic consulting firm; Kayrros, a global energy and environmental geoanalytics company; and Floodbase, a company that uses geospatial data to generate flood maps in real-time.”
Element 84 Acquires Azavea to Provide Comprehensive, Impact-Focused Geospatial Solutions [link]
“Alexandria, VA-based Element 84 has acquired Philadelphia technology company Azavea, joining forces as a singular professional services firm focused on the open source geospatial technology ecosystem.”
NOAA Awards JPSS LEO Ground Sustainment Services Contract to Peraton [link]
“NOAA awarded the Low Earth Orbit (LEO) Ground Sustainment Services (LGSS) contract to Peraton, Inc. based in Herndon, Virginia. The purpose of the LGSS contract is for sustainment of the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) Common Ground Services (CGS) while accommodating enhancements and additions to NOAA’s existing LEO satellite constellations and partner missions.”
Developer’s Orbit
Perform cloud masking in Sentinel-2 images yourself. [link]
While trying to understand the impact of glacier contamination by light absorbing impurities/particles (LAPs), Som Mishra faced the challenge of cloud covered Sentinel-2 images over the study site, Chhota Shigri Glacier (CSG) in the Indian Western Himalayas. He observed that the available cloud products consistently overestimated cloud cover in his study area. Follow his post to learn how he build a training dataset and used Nearest Neighbour to classify cloud covered pixels, outperforming the accuracy of the available products.
Sentinel-1 InSAR PyGMTSAR Co-Seismic Interferogram at 2023–02–06 for CENTRAL Türkiye Mw 7.8 & 7.5 Earthquakes on Google Colab [link]
Alexey Pechnikov put together this interactive notebook processing 2 Sentinel-1 SLC scenes 3 subswath with resolution 90m in about 6 hours (and in 8 hours for 60m resolution).
Sentinel-1 scenes were downloaded from Alaska Satellite Facility (ASF).
[Google Colab Link]
[PyGMTSAR GitHub Link]
Related:
PyGMTSAR is Next Generation Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) Software for Everyone [link]
Data
An Ensemble Digital Terrain Model of the world at 30 m spatial resolution (EDTM30) [link]
High Resolution Settlement Layer (HRSL) published by Meta [link]
The HRSL dataset provides estimates of human population distribution at a resolution of 1 arc-second (approximately 30m).
Meta has recently published new HRSL V1.5 data for Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam.
Snapshots
Planet Snapshots Issue 63: Space Analogs [link]
In this week’s issue:
Earth landscapes as proxy for space exploration
Red lakes powered by bacteria
Balloons and a slab of concrete
Ice ice breaker
Norway’s International Climate and Forests Initiative Satellite Data Program (NICFI) [link]
The use of SPOT archive satellite imagery allows users of the NICFI (Norway’s International Climate and Forest Initiative) Satellite Data Program project to report on forestry policies.
Interesting reads
More Data More Available to More People [link]
In this post, Jed Sundwall from Radiant Earth Foundation writes his thoughts on what “open” means in the context of the remote sensing community; More data, available to more people.
Why Amazon Web Services Is Going To Space [link]
To avoid bandwidth and latency problems, AWS is experimenting with providing computing at the edge — on the very spacecraft that collected the data in the first place. Last year AWS demonstrated that by processing images onboard, the edge-computing device can determine whether or not the image is usable and decide which parts of the image to sent back to Earth, thus reducing the amount of transfered data by 42%.
Satellite data used for road infrastructure safety in Italy [link]
“A new ground motion service utilising Copernicus satellite data is being used by the Italian road agency to detect and monitor unstable ground — helping improve nationwide road infrastructure safety.”
Copernicus Sentinel-2 helps explorers unearth rare 7.6 kg meteorite in Antarctica [link]
“A Belgium-led science team based in Antarctica used Copernicus Sentinel-2 data to plan an expedition that recovered one of the biggest meteorites ever found in Earth’s southernmost continent.”
Upcoming Webinars
European Ground Motion Service webinar series 2023 [link]
“The European Ground Motion Service (EGMS) is a brand-new type of geospatial data, with the power to revolutionise the understanding of ground deformation phenomena and geological hazards across Europe.
In order to facilitate the uptake of this novel product type, the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (CLMS) team is delighted to announce a series of thematic webinars that will guide users towards a better understanding of the EGMS and the use of its products. The webinars are open for all.
The first webinar will be entitled “EGMS, a general introduction” and will take place on Thursday, 2 March 2023.”