Spectral Reflectance Newsletter #5
Weekly newsletter on Earth Observation
Level-2 News
Celebrating 50 Years of Landsat
Even though the first Landsat satellite was launched on July 23, 1972, as the Pecora 22 Symposium is in progress, I consider the 50-year anniversary of Landsat ongoing. Named after William T. Pecora, the USGS Director who helped initiate the Landsat program in the 1960s, the conference is hosted by NASA and the USGS, with an overarching theme of Opening the Aperture to Innovation: Expanding Our Collective Understanding of a Changing Earth, celebrating Landsat’s legacy.
Read this Medium story written by Robert Simmon that chronicles and celebrates the 50-year legacy of the Landsat program.
Follow the links below for more:
Landsat 9; Continuing 50 years of eyes on our Changing Planet [link]
Landsat: Celebrating 50 Years (YouTube) [link]
USGS’s Six-part Series Highlighting the 50th Anniversary of Landsat
Part 1: Pioneer in Promoting Food Security from Space [link]
Part 2: Sharing Earth information for the benefit of all [link]
Part 3: Observing Global Forests from above the Canopy [link]
Part 4: Impartial Eye on Climate Change [link]
Part 5: Watchman for Wildfires [link]
Part 6: Observing Earth To Look Forward [link]
Fifty Years of Exploration and Innovation: How Landsat Launched the Remote Sensing Era [link]
First of Three Million [link]
Sentinel-1C arrives in Cannes [link]
The Copernicus Sentinel-1C satellite is currently in Cannes undergoing a series of demanding tests in preparation for launch in 2023!
Canada will contribute to NASA’s international Atmosphere Observing System [link]
“Currently slated to launch in 2028 and 2031, this major multi-satellite mission will improve extreme weather prediction, climate modelling, and monitoring of disasters. Canada’s contribution to the AOS is the High-altitude Aerosols, Water vapour and Clouds (HAWC) mission. It consists of two Canadian instruments on a Canadian satellite and a third instrument on a NASA satellite, all planned for launch in 2031.”
Azavea’s server, Franklin, now supports the latest STAC API [link]
“Franklin is an Azavea server that imports and serves STAC catalogs, storing data in Postgres. It allows users to import and query STAC catalogs as simply as possible; “from Static Data to a Dynamic API in Minutes.”
Developer’s Orbit
Awesome Spectral Indices in Python [link]
“Spyndex is a python package that uses the spectral indices from the Awesome Spectral Indices list and creates an expression evaluation method that is compatible with python object classes that support overloaded operators (e.g. numpy.ndarray, pandas.Series, xarray.DataArray).”
Data Carpentry’s Introduction to Geospatial Raster and Vector Data with Python [link]
The workshop covers several lessons with focus on geospatial concepts and tools. It covers tasks like handling pandas dataframes, plotting, searching a STAC catalog and downloading assets using pystac_client, reading and visualizing raster data with rioxarray and rasterio, etc.
“The data used includes optical satellite images from the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission and public geographical datasets from the dedicated distribution platform of the Dutch government.”
Global surface urban heat islands (SUHI) Explorer [Earth Engine App]
Tirthankar “TC” Chakraborty created this Earth Engine App — he implemented the simplified urban-extent (SUE) algorithm to estimate the surface urban heat island (UHI) intensity at a global scale.
Follow this Twitter thread for more. [link]
Featured Use-case
Research reveals magma activity beneath Mount Edgecumbe [link]
Mount Edgecumbe, a transform fault volcano in southeast Alaska was last active approximately 800 years ago. But in April 2022, a seismic swarm near Mt. Edgecumbe suggested renewed activity. A team of researchers from the Alaska Volcano Observatory analyzed data from 2014 to 2022 and found an area of ground uplift on southern Kruzof Island 17km in diameter and centered 2.5km east of the volcano. InSAR revealed up to 7.1 cm/yr of constant line-of-sight inflation since August 2018 at Mt. Edgecumbe with microseismicity since July 2019. Furthermore, Bayesian modeling suggests that magma is rising to about 10km from a depth of about 20km and has caused earthquakes and significant surface deformation.
It’s worth noting that, as last week’s featured use-case, the data processing for this work was done on Alaska Satellite Facility’s (ASF) OpenSARLab!
Interesting reads
Jane Jacobs in the Sky: 8,400 small satellite images are used
to spot the most vibrant neighborhoods in six Italian cities [link]
Sanja Šćepanović (Miki) and her colleagues at Nokia Bell Labs tried to answer this question: Could we tell which city blocks are the most vibrant by looking at Sentinel-2 images?
Check their amazing visualizations on their website for this project [link], their presentation for CSCW ’21 [YouTube video] and their paper, titled “Jane Jacobs in the Sky: Predicting Urban Vitality with Open Satellite Data” on arXiv [link].
How are Satellites Used to Observe the Ocean? [link]
Follow this short article to learn more about the history of Ocean observation and key applications for ocean satellites.
Upcoming webinar
Webinar: “Release WorldCover 2021” [link]
“In October last year, the WorldCover consortium released the first global land cover map at 10 m resolution for 2020 based on both Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 data commissioned by the European Space Agency (ESA). Following the positive feedback from the users, ESA decided to extend the WorldCover project and requested the WorldCover consortium to produce a 2021 version of the product with even higher quality. This new and improved WorldCover map for 2021 will be released on October 28, 2022.
Join the release webinar to learn more on the algorithm improvements and how to access this global land cover map at 10m resolution.
Follow these links for more on the the WorldCover project.
WorldCover website [link]
WorldCover viewer [link]
Learning
Synthetic Aperture Radar: Hazards (EdX course) [link]
Register at this course created by the University of Alaska Fairbanks for an introduction to Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and learn about the applications of SAR to the monitoring of natural hazards.
Session recordings from Geo for Good 2022 are out!
Here is the YouTube playlist with the live streamed and recorded Geo for Good Summit 2022 content. You can also view them here.
Latest stories from Spectral Reflectance
How to download Earth Observation datasets using Python with Radiant MLHub, TorchGeo and Dataset4EO [link]