Level-2 News
European satellite strikes lightning [link]
“The first ever satellite instrument capable of continuously detecting lightning across Europe and Africa has now been switched on. New animations from the innovative ‘Lighting Imager’ confirm the instrument will revolutionise the detection and prediction of severe storms.”
NASA opposes lithium mining at tabletop flat Nevada desert site used to calibrate satellites [link]
“An ancient Nevada lakebed beckons as a vast source of the coveted element needed to produce cleaner electric energy and fight global warming. But NASA says the same site — flat as a tabletop and undisturbed like none other in the Western Hemisphere — is indispensable for calibrating the razor-sharp measurements of hundreds of satellites orbiting overhead.”
OroraTech orders eight more wildfire-monitoring satellites [link]
“Germany’s OroraTech has ordered eight more thermal imaging satellites from Spire Global to expand its wildfire-monitoring constellation next year.
The satellites would be identical to FOREST-2 (Forest Observation and Recognition Experimental Smallsat Thermal Detector), a 6U spacecraft the size of six cubesats that SpaceX launched in a June 12 rideshare mission.”
Airbus’ Optical VHR2021 Coverage over Europe to support Copernicus is now completed! [link]
“At the end of March, Airbus delivered to the Copernicus Space Component Data Access (CSCDA), the latest satellite imagery to complete the VHR IMAGE 2021 Optical Cloud-free coverage of 39 European States! Last month, the complete coverage over Europe was validated by ESA!
This cloud-free coverage is primarily composed of very high-accuracy cloud-free satellite ortho-images with a 2m spatial resolution acquired within the 2021 vegetation season, responding to the users’ needs as defined by the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (CLMS).”
The 126 French Cities Threatened by Coastal Erosion [link]
“The French Government unveiled the list in 2022 of the 126 municipalities threatened by coastal erosion and the retreat of the coastline accentuated by climate change. Initially, 126 cities are affected by this regulation out of 864 cities recognized as vulnerable to marine flooding.”
Impact Observatory, Planet Labs Partner to Deliver Near Real-Time Change Monitoring [link]
“Impact Observatory announced it has entered into a partnership with Planet Labs PBC. The partnership uses AI-powered analytics to monitor land cover and land use (LULC) on top of Planet’s high-frequency, medium- and high-resolution satellite data.”
Airmo raises 5.2 million euros for climate-monitoring constellation [link]
“Airmo, a German startup planning to obtain space-based measurements of greenhouse gas emissions, has raised 5.2 million euros ($5.7 million) in pre-seed funding, including investment and a European Space Agency contract.
With the funding announced, Airmo will launch the first of 12 satellites equipped with spectrometers and small light detection and ranging (lidar) instruments to measure atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane.”
Developer’s Orbit
Using xarray to examine cloud-based glacier surface velocity data [link]
“This tutorial will demonstrate how to access and work with with multi-dimensional remote sensing data using the python package and open source project xarray. This example will use a glacier surface velocity dataset called ITS_LIVE.”
Image loading benchmark: Fastest way to load large images from disk into GPU. [link]
Follow this image loading benchmark by Laassairi Abdellah, where they try loading a high resolution image using several Python libraries.
Leafmap notebook demo at the EarthCube workshop in Los Angeles on June 27. [link]
Data
S2SOCmonit dataset [link]
“Bare soil spectral composite for soil organic carbon estimation for the federal state of Brandenburg, Germany. It provides spectral information of bare soils as derived from Sentinel-2 time series data from March 2017 to October 2019.”
Snapshots
Crayons Of The Seas: A Visual Exploration Of Marine Biodiversity With Satellite Imagery [link]
“The Crayons of the Seas project by SKY Perfect JSAT, one of Asia’s largest satellite communication companies based in Japan. Crayons of the Seas is a science-meets-art collaboration that created one-of-a-kind hues of biodegradable crayons representing twelve colors of the ocean based on Planet’s satellite imagery of our watery highways.”
Visit the Cryons of The Seas website [link]
Earth from Space: Southwest Netherlands [link]
“This multitemporal picture is a combination of three radar images, each assigned to a colour channel: red for the image acquired in August 2022, green for the second image taken in January 2023, and blue for the last image from June 2023.
The combined images, with their different colours, help identify changes that have occurred between the acquisitions. For example, the green means that the vegetation was particularly lush when the January image was acquired.”
Interesting reads
[Paper] In-orbit demonstration of a re-trainable machine learning payload for processing optical imagery [link]
In this work, Gonzalo Mateo García et al. demonstrate, in a satellite deployed in orbit, a ML payload called ‘WorldFloods’ that is able to send compressed flood maps from sensed images.
Space to empower rural food producers [link]
“ESA has strengthened their partnership with the UN International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) to help vulnerable small-scale food producers not only increase their ability to grow food but adapt to climate change by using state-of-the-art Earth observation data.”
Competitions
FLAIR #2: semantic segmentation from Earth Observation data [link]
“Participants will be tasked with developing innovative solutions that can effectively harness the textural information from single date aerial imagery and temporal information from Sentinel-2 satellite time series to enhance semantic segmentation, domain adaptation, and transfer learning.”
Upcoming Events
2023 InSAR Processing and Analysis (ISCE+) Short Course [link]
“This 5-day course will cover basic and advanced InSAR theory, including InSAR processing with the JPL/Caltech InSAR Scientific Computing Environment (ISCE).
This short course is geared towards graduate students, postdocs and early career scientists interested in using InSAR in their research, as well as instructors who plan to teach InSAR processing and analysis.
Applications are due July 17.”
Podcasts
Episode 97 — EROS 50th: Earth As Art [link]
“Satellites capture an incredible variety of views of Earth. In this episode, the guests are three engineers at USGS EROS who started the USGS Earth As Art project. The Earth As Art origin story is an example of the initiative and creativity of EROS staff. This stunningly visual product grabs the public’s attention — and then leads to conversations about the value of remote sensing with satellites.”
Learning
Recordings of the 7th European Space Agency — ESA Advanced Course on Radar Polarimetry are available on YouTube [link]
“For all course materials, including lecture presentations and practical materials (Jupyter Notebooks, SAR imagery used, and the accompanying Python Environment) go to https://eo4society.esa.int/resources/7th-advanced-training-course-radar-polarimetry/
For more information about the course go to the course website: https://polarimetrycourse2023.esa.int/”
NASA-ESA-JAXA EO Dashboard — Workshop at FOSS4G [link]
“The workshop provided participants with the opportunity to get familiar with the new features, data and capabilities of the NASA-ESA-JAXA EO Dashboard, and learn more about the technology behind directly from the development teams involved in the project. They also had a chance to try out the open access dashboard and work with its data in the Jupyter Lab environment of the Euro Data Cube platform, to which ESA is providing “free at point of use” access via the Network of Resources.”
Spatial Thoughts OpenCourseWare [link]
Spatial Thoughts offers the following courses:
QGIS
Introduction to QGIS
Advanced QGIS
Python
Python Foundation for Spatial Analysis
Mapping and Data Visualization with Python
Customizing QGIS with Python
GDAL
Mastering GDAL Tools
Google Earth Engine
End-to-End Google Earth Engine
Google Earth Engine for Water Resources Management