Spectral Reflectance Newsletter #7

Weekly newsletter on Earth Observation

Level-2 News

“EnMAP — One im­age, a wealth of in­for­ma­tion” [link]. Credit: DLR

Users can now access the En­MAP data archive [link]
On 2 November 2022, the German environmental mission EnMAP completed its test phase and entered routine operations. Since its launch, in April this year, EnMAP has recorded more than 11.4 million square kilometres of Earth’s surface — an area larger than Europe, using its 242 spectral channels. 
Users can access the EnMAP data archive for downloading EnMAP L1B, L1C and L2A data products and submit observation requests after registering at planning.enmap.org.
The EnMAP mission data are free of charge.

BIOMASS: forest monitoring satellite departs for final testing before launch [link]
“BIOMASS, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) forest measuring satellite has left the Airbus Defence and Space site in Stevenage and is on its way to Toulouse for final testing ahead of launch (in 2024).
ESA’s flagship Earth Explorer mission will measure forest biomass to assess terrestrial carbon stocks and fluxes at an altitude of 600km above the Earth. The spacecraft will carry the first space-borne P-band synthetic aperture radar, delivering exceptionally accurate maps of tropical, temperate and boreal forest biomass that are not obtainable by ground measurement techniques.”
“It will give scientists vital information about just how much carbon is locked up and also being absorbed by the “lungs” of the planet enabling better decisions to be made on tackling climate change.”

Related:
- The ESA Biomass mission: weighing forests from space, Prof Shaun Quegan [YouTube link]
- Weighing the world’s forests from space with Professor Shaun Quegan [YouTube link]
- BIOMASS Mission (Space4Climate, University of Reading) [YouTube link]
- ESA releases multi-year biomass maps to keep tabs on climate change [link]

Fund your project using ESA’s Network of Resources (NoR) [link]
The NoR is an ESA initiative to facilitate the use of cloud environments, sponsoring the use of commercial platform resources. Projects eligible for funding include Research, Educational, Pre-commercial projects and NGO/ NPO.

Get up to €5000 in funding for your UP42 projects with NoR [link]
How to apply for a NoR sponsorship (for services of the openEO Platform) [link]

Kinshasa, Congo [link]. Credit: Sentinel-Hub

ESA World Cover 2020 and 2021 available on SentinelHub [link]
The European Space Agency (ESA) WorldCover is a global land cover map with 11 different land cover classes produced at 10m resolution based on combination of both Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 data.

First edition of the joint WMO — C3S State of the Climate in Europe report unveils impacts of climate change [link]
Europe is the fastest warming World Meteorological Organization (WMO) region and the direct impacts of climate change affected hundreds of thousands of citizens during 2021, according to a new report issued by the WMO and the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S).

Check the interactive map about the main findings. [link]

Adirondack Mountains in northeast New York. Landsat 9 acquired this image on October 8, 2022. Credit: NASA

Fall Colors — NASA Earth Observatory [link]
A collection of satellite images capturing Earth in an autumn colour palette!

Developer’s Orbit

My ERA5 Journey: From API-to-ARCO [link]
Learn how to use the API to access ERA5-Land data (snow depth and soil moisture) and create a cloud-optimized dataset using Dask, Xarray, Xbitinfo, Kerchunk, and Intake.

Speaker: Rich Signell
Zenodo [link]
Github repo [link]

Datasets

LandCoverNet Australia [link]
LandCoverNet is a global annual land cover classification training dataset with labels for the multi-spectral satellite imagery from Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2 and Landsat-8 missions in 2018. LandCoverNet Australia contains data across Australia. There are a total of 600 image chips of 256 x 256 pixels in LandCoverNet Australia V1.0 spanning 20 tiles.

OpenEarthMap [link]
OpenEarthMap is a benchmark dataset for global high-resolution land cover mapping. OpenEarthMap consists of 5000 aerial and satellite images with manually annotated 8-class land cover labels and 2.2 million segments at a 0.25–0.5m ground sampling distance, covering 97 regions from 44 countries across 6 continents.

Interesting read

Left: Sentinel-2 NDWI composite on 8th May 2022. Right: Another Sentinel-2 NDWI composite on 26th June 2022, afterthe the floods (on the 18th); On the right NDWI high values mark the areas affected by the floods. Source: Sentinel Hub EO Browser

Nature’s Wrath — 2022 Silchar Floods, Assam; Exploring the event with Sentinel Hub EO Browser and open EO data [link]
Pawan Muddu ( pawan muddu) participated in the Sentinel Hub Custom Script Contest. His story, about the 2022 Silchar floods, was awarded the second best written story [link].

Upcoming workshop

IEEE GRSS workshop on Remote Sensing Data Management Technologies in GeoScience 2022 (RSDM-GeoSci 2022) [link]
Topics may include: 
- Spatio-temporal database solutions for Big Remote Sensing Data 
- Graph databases, knowledge graph, graph visualization, web semantics tools/technologies for managing and discovering data and metadata in Remote Sensing
- Novel database solutions for Analysis-Ready Data (ARD)
- Using Big Data management and analysis tools for Remote Sensing data management and analysis
- (Near-)Real-time intelligence from Remote Sensing platforms

Registration is FREE

Learning

CCI Biomass 1st User Workshop 2022 [link]
Recorded directly from the Europen Space Agency’s (ESA) Climate Change Initiative (CCI) Biomass User Workshop (28th-30th June 2022).