🎉✨ Thank you all for reading Spectral Reflectance this year!
Here’s to a bright 2024! 🎉✨
Level-2 News
Axelspace raises $44 million for Earth observation and other smallsats [link]
"Japanese Earth observation company Axelspace has raised nearly $44 million to both expand its satellite constellation and provide smallsats for other applications.
The Tokyo-based company announced Dec. 21 that it raised 6.24 billion yen ($43.9 million) in a Series D round from several Japanese companies and venture funds. The company, which last raised 2.58 billion yen in a Series C round in 2021, has brought in 14.3 billion yen since its founding in 2008.
The company currently operates five microsatellites that provide medium-resolution imagery through a service it calls AxelGlobe. Four of those satellites launched in 2021, three years after its first satellite. Axelspace said the new funding will support expansion of its satellite constellation but did not provide details about the plans."
Terrabotics Launches EmissionsAnalyst [link]
"Terrabotics launched EmissionsAnalystâ„¢, a product developed as part of the European Space Agency (ESA) and UK Space Agency co-funded Energy SCOUTâ„¢ program. EmissionsAnalyst brings together satellite, aerial, and even ground sensing data sources in one place - providing industrial stakeholders with the tools they need to objectively find and fix major sources of greenhouse gas emissions effectively."
Year in review
Radiant Earth’s Highlights [link]
Jed Sundwall lists a few of Radiant Earth’s highlights this year!
From launching Source Cooperative to releasing one of the largest Earth Observation training datasets for Machine Learning applications (link), it’s been a busy year for Radiant Earth!
The year in review: C3S milestones in 2023 [link]
"This year has been a year of many milestones for the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S*). From the Global Climate Highlights released in January to its participation in COP28 in November-December, 2023 has been a busy year for the Service as it continues to provide quality-assured data on the evolving state of Earth’s climate, supporting decision-makers and they develop climate action strategies."
Snapshots

Frosty the Volcano [link]
"Frosty is a stratovolcano located in Alaska’s Aleutian Island chain. Although the volcano has been dormant for thousands of years, the rock below its glaciated peak tells a story of its lively past."
The Albufera Lagoon [link]
"The Albufera Lagoon is located in the Albufera Natural Park, in the autonomous region of Valencia in Spain. Since 1989 the Park has been registered as a Ramsar Site and Wetland of International Importance. It is characterized by the suggestive green colors of its shallow waters, but during the month of October 2023 the lagoon began to progressively acquire a different color, turning to orange and brown."
Interesting reads
Measuring snow and ice properties with Sentinel-3 [link]
"An improved version of the SICE algorithm retrieving snow and ice properties is described in a recently published paper. It includes the introduction of a new atmospheric correction, retrieval of snow impurity load and properties, retrievals for partially snow-covered ground and also accounting for various thresholds to be used to assess the retrieval quality."

As the Arctic Warms, Its Waters Are Emitting Carbon [link]
"Recent findings show that thawing permafrost and carbon-rich runoff from Canada’s Mackenzie River trigger part of the Arctic Ocean to release more carbon dioxide (CO2) than it absorbs."
Upcoming Events
Supporting Marine Earth Observation Applications MOOC [link]
"In early 2024 EUMETSAT will convene the next iteration of the "Supporting Marine Earth Observation Applications (SMA)" course, introducing you to our marine data catalogue and helping you develop workflows that support your own application-specific goals.
During this course you will learn how to independently access and process data from the EUMETSAT product catalogue for your marine workflows and applications. The focus will be on data streams from EUMETSAT Copernicus marine missions (Sentinel-3; Sentinel-6) and derived downstream products, those derived from Copernicus supporting missions, and those made available by the Ocean and Sea-Ice Satellite Application Facility (OSI SAF)."
Climate Change AI Summer School 2024; Expression of interest [link]
"The Climate ChangeAI summer school will return 2024 with both virtual & in person programs.
This is the form to express your interest in the 2024 Summer School."
2nd Machine Learning for Remote Sensing Workshop; Call for papers [link]
"This workshop promotes trans-disciplinary research through diverse view-points to tackle the pressing questions of our times, such as climate change, social inequalities, biodiversity, and food security. Developing modern machine learning approaches tailored towards remote sensing data is key to investigating these problems efficiently. This second Machine Learning for Remote Sensing (ML4RS) workshop promotes this exchange by allowing researchers to present their research on environmentally and societally important applications and/or innovative methods that can have an impact in such application domains."
Submission Deadline - February 3rd, 2024 (11:59 pm AoE)
Decentralized Geospatial Web Working Group (dGWWG) w/ Jed Sundwall [link]
"EASIER data initiative's next Decentralized Geospatial Web Working Group on January 24 at 1 PM EST will feature guest speaker Jed Sundwall. Jed is the executive director Radiant Earth and will be sharing a vision for a Cloud-Native Geospatial Web and ongoing work to develop Source Cooperative, which is a platform for sharing geospatial data products.
2024 IEEE GRSS Data Fusion Contest - Flood Rapid Mapping [link]
"The 2024 IEEE GRSS Data Fusion Contest (DFC24) aims to advance image analysis and data fusion algorithms that generate reliable flood maps from multi-modal Earth observation imagery. The DFC24 provides a large-scale, multi-modal flood mapping benchmarking dataset. It comprises two challenging competition tracks on the flood mapping task, one based on SAR imagery and another using passive-optical imagery.
Important dates:
January 8: Contest opening: release of training and validation data (start of phase 1)
March 11: Release of test data; evaluation server begins accepting test submissions (start of phase 2)
March 17: Evaluation server stops accepting submissions (end of phase 2)"