Spectral Reflectance Newsletter #26
Spectral Reflectance Newsletter #26
Weekly newsletter on Earth Observation
Level-2 News
NRO signs agreements with commercial providers of hyperspectral imagery [link]
The National Reconnaissance Office has signed five-year agreements with six commercial providers of hyperspectral satellite imagery in order to explore the potential of commercial hyperspectral imagery to be used in the context of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.
Airbus signs agreement with TerraNIS to export Farmstar in Europe [link]
“Airbus Defence and Space has signed an agreement with TerraNIS to export Farmstar, the space-based precision farming and crop monitoring service, outside of France.”
ECMWF digital twins aid sustainable forestry operations under new Destination Earth use case [link]
The Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI) and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) have signed a new use case contract to apply Destination Earth’s digital twins’ capabilities to improve forestry operations.
Satellogic sells Earth-imagery satellites [link]
“Satellogic, the South American company known for high-resolution multispectral imagery, is selling Earth-observation satellites for $10 million or less.”
Earth observation supports latest UN climate report [link]
“The final instalment of the sixth assessment report by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been released. The report warns that the planet has already warmed 1.1°C above pre-industrial levels. The report also includes a greater contribution of Earth observation data than its previous iterations in providing the physical evidence of Earth’s changing climate system — from sea-level rise, growing greenhouse-gas emissions and melting sea ice.”
NASA Selects L3Harris to Develop Imager for NOAA Satellite [link]
“NASA, on behalf of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), has selected L3Harris to develop the imager for NOAA’s Geostationary Extended Observations (GeoXO) satellite program.”
Developer’s Orbit
How to map floodwater from radar imagery using semantic segmentation — benchmark [link]
Follow this Jupyter Notebook and train a UNet on Sentinel-1 image to segment floodwater.
First release of sen2nbar [link]
sen2nbar is a Python package for converting Sentinel2 SR to Nadir BRDF Adjusted Reflectance (NBAR).
You can use the package to convert #Sentinel2 images via:
SAFE (Complete images)
stackstac (data cubes from STAC)
cubo (mini EO data cubes)
from sen2nbar.nbar import nbar_SAFE
# Converted images are saved inside the SAFE path
nbar_SAFE("S2A_MSIL2A_20230223T075931_N0509_R035_T35HLC_20230223T120656.SAFE")Google Earth Engine (GEE) as a Publicly Available Supercomputer [link]
Follow this tutorial by Alexey Pechnikov to learn how to efficiently implement raster vectorization and write a server-side GEE function for calculating geohash.
Snapshots
Planet Snapshots Issue 67: Terrestrial Carbon [link]
In this week’s issue:
Satellites establish terrestrial carbon baselines
The rains flood Australia’s Northern Territory
Drones and satellites pair up to get a closer look
Interesting reads
Tracking the Chinese Balloon From Space [link]
“The New York Times worked with the artificial intelligence company Synthetaic to detect and analyze the Chinese balloon in satellite images captured by Planet Labs.”
Related:
Needle in a Needlestack: How Our AI Tracked the Chinese Balloon in Millions of Square Miles of Unlabeled Satellite Data [link]
In the heat of the moment; How satellite data are helping authorities and other data users to better understand the impacts of heatwaves and drought and identify warning signs [link]
Follow this article to learn more about the extreme droughts that we witnessed last year, the signs that indicated that a major drought was coming and how satellite data are used to forecast extreme events, assess their impact and understand the drivers of extreme conditions and how best to respond to them.
Recovering forests regain a quarter of carbon lost from deforestation [link]
“Read this article about a new research, published in Nature and led by the University of Bristol and Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE), that showed how degraded forests and regrowth of secondary forests in previously deforested areas, are annually removing at least 107 million tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere across the Tropics.”
Collaboration on Glaciers and Ice Sheets Research [link]
“Researchers and scientists across the globe are paying daily attention to two glaciers located in West Antarctica. Thwaites Glacier is a mammoth sheet of ice. It is melting and changing so rapidly that it has been nicknamed Doomsday Glacier.”
Presentations from the Pléiades Neo Challenge [link]
Go through the presentations from the participants who ran their studies for the Pléiades Neo Challenge. In total 17 use cases are now available, including coastal monitoring, cliff erosion, city vegetation mapping, archaeology and many other application fields.
Learning
What is a disoriented double bounce? [link]
Follow this article by Elise Colin on the disoriented double bounce.
Great explanations and animations!
Best Data from Space: How We Attain Optimal Spatial Resolution Imagery [link]
“This article, the first of the series created by Satellogic, focuses on spatial resolution quality and procedures to validate and calibrate the satellite’s payload in the laboratory and orbit.”