Spectral Reflectance Newsletter #72
Weekly newsletter on Earth Observation
🎉 Spectral Reflectance has reached 300 subscribers! 🎉
Thank you for all for your support and engagement!
Level-2 News
INSAT-3DS has initiated Earth imaging operations [link]
"INSAT-3DS, the meteorological satellite, has initiated Earth imaging operations. The first set of images by the meteorological payloads (6-channel Imager and 19-channel Sounder) was captured on March 7, 2024."
Orbio Earth raises a $4m seed round to power global methane emissions reduction [link]
Orbio Earth (YC S23) announced thay they have successfully closed a $4m seed round to accelerate their methane reduction tracking product.
Related:
Orbio Earth finds methane leaks that could cost oil companies billions this year [link]
Floodbase, ARC & Global Parametrics team up on African flood insurance programs [link]
"Insurtech Floodbase, which acts as a data provider and reporting agent for parametric risk transfer arrangements, is partnering with African Risk Capacity Limited (ARC Ltd.) and CelsiusPro-owned Global Parametrics, to deliver parametric flood insurance programs in Mozambique and Malawi."
Umbra Unveils Bistatic SAR Data from its Tandem Pair of Satellites [link]
"Umbra announced the forthcoming release of imagery from its tandem pair of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites. Umbra is set to provide customers with bistatic SAR data later in 2024."
The announcement came 10 months after Umbra won a constrct from DARPA to demonstrate bistatic collection.
Related:
Last year, Capella Space also demostrated its bistatic collection capabilities. [link]
In there announcement they said that bistatic SAR can be used to avoid interference from radar jamming.
Planet Adds to its Planetary Variable Product Suite with Automated Field Boundary Detection [link]
"Planet Labs announced the release of Field Boundaries, the latest add in their suite of advanced data feeds called Planetary Variables. Field Boundaries will provide critical infrastructure for agriculture solutions, including regional crop monitoring and yield estimation over broad areas, serving customers in civil government, commercial agriculture, finance, and consumer packaged goods industries."
Tutorial and technical specification
Workflow: Obtain and Visualize Field Boundaries over an AOI in Northern France [link]
Planet Field Boundaries Technical Specification [link]
Data
TreeSatAI Benchmark Archive: a multi-sensor, multi-label dataset for tree species classification in remote sensing [link]
"Ahlswede et al. introduced the TreeSatAI Benchmark Archive, a new dataset for tree species classification in Central Europe based on multi-sensor data from aerial, Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2. The dataset contains labels of 20 European tree species (i.e., 15 tree genera) derived from forest administration data of the federal state of Lower Saxony, Germany.
The dataset covers 50 381 patches of 60mx60m located in Germany."
Paper:
TreeSatAI Benchmark Archive: a multi-sensor, multi-label dataset for tree species classification in remote sensing [link]
Paper Trails to Pixels: Historical USGS Topo Maps in Google Earth Engine Community Catalog [link]
Read this deep dive by Samapriya Roy on how he incorporated over 100,000+ georeferenced USGS Historical Topo maps from 1900s-2006 across the US into a Google Earth Engine collection and how you can bring them to your use case.
Snapshots
After heavy storms, Death Valley is now open to kayakers: The return of ghostly Lake Manly [link]
"Storms pummeling Southern California have dramatically transformed Death Valley National Park, doubling the size of a vast temporary lake that is even visible to orbiting spacecraft.
As of mid-February, the lake — referred to as Lake Manly — was 6 miles long, 3 miles wide and up to 2 feet deep in some places"
Saharan dust crossing the Mediterranean to SE Europe [link]
"Another episode of Saharan dust crossing the Mediterranean to SE Europe in Copernicus Atmosphere 5-day forecast of aerosol optical depth from 10 March. This is the latest of several monitored so far in 2024."
Related:
Repeated Saharan dust intrusions raise questions about increasing frequency [link]
Interesting reads
Satellites detect effect of shipping pollution on clouds [link]
"Clouds play a dual role in regulating the Earth’s temperature. They can act as both a shield, reflecting incoming sunlight back into space, and as a blanket, keeping heat from below in. Over the ocean, low-hanging stratocumulus clouds have an overall cooling effect because these clouds are more effective at reflecting sunlight than trapping the warmth underneath. This is why when ships emit aerosols – tiny particles of sulphur dioxide and black carbon – via their exhaust, causing changes in the clouds above, this local effect has far-reaching impacts on the global climate.
On 22 February, Dr Nikos Benas and Dr Jan Fokke Meirink of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute and Dr Rob Roebeling of EUMETSAT’s User Support & Climate Services published a case study exploring the impact of global maritime shipping pollution on clouds."
Related:
Tracking the impact of shipping pollution on Earth's climate [link]
A country’s first air quality monitor: the most valuable step to clean air [link]
"39% of countries have no public air pollution monitoring. A new study reveals that 46 countries can make the biggest clean air gains from implementing a single air quality monitor."
UN-SPIDER’s flagship publication on Space Technologies for Early Warning Systems [link]
"Check out UN-SPIDER’s flagship publication on Space Technologies for Early Warning Systems, which includes more than 80 case studies provided by experts, industry, and governments.
Satellites can save lives. Space technologies can support early warning systems to detect and monitor when and where hazards, such as storms, floods, droughts, wildfires, and others may take place."
Satellites burning up in our atmosphere may not be as harmless as first thought [link]
"Satellites and spacecraft burning up in our atmosphere are leaving metal particles in the stratosphere — and scientists are worried it could harm our planet.
About 10% of the particles floating around the stratosphere now come from the aerospace industry, and we don't know if this could impact the climate."
150th Anniversary: J.W. Powell's Perilous River Expedition [link]
"Powell’s journey 150 years ago became one of the great surveys of the west that led to the formation of the U.S. Geological Survey. Powell said, “The exploration was not made for adventure, but purely for scientific purposes, geographic and geologic” (Powell, 2003). But it turned out to be an epic adventure.
The expedition team left Green River, Wyoming, on May 24, 1869, and made it past the Grand Canyon to the confluence of the Colorado River and the Virgin River on August 30. Enjoy the stories of the adventures along the way."
Already hundreds of wildfires annually in the Netherlands [link]
"Satellites ‘see’ wildfires covering 30 hectares and more, while the average wildfire in the Netherlands covers 1.5 hectares. This means that only 0.2% of all wildfires in the Netherlands are recorded in the European satellite database. Many countries supplement this database with data from the ground. The Netherlands does not. The number of wildfires in our country is therefore greatly underestimated, even though our analysis of recent fire history shows that they can result in challenges and problems"
The Highest Fidelity Weather Data In History: The 3rd-Gen Meteosat Is Live [link]
"With MTG-I1 open for normal operations, its CMOS sensors will provide the most accurate look into the climate in realtime"
From Spectral Reflectance
The future of the commercial satellite imagery industry (+survey) [link]
Prompted by recent discussions about the future of the EO market, I invite you to participate in this short survey, to further explore these topics and share your insights.
LinkedIn Highlights
What happened in US commercial SAR between 2018-2024 [link]
"2024 marks the sixth anniversary of US-flagged commercial SAR satellites being in orbit and the fifth year of the NRO studying integration of commercial SAR into national security missions."
Follow this post by Joe Morrison, VP of Growth at Umbra Space, on what has happened in US commercial SAR between 2018-2024.
Upcoming Events
MOOC Cubes and Clouds [link]
"The course explains the concepts of data cubes, EO cloud platforms, and open science by applying them to a typical EO workflow from data discovery, and data processing up to sharing the results in an open and FAIR way.
The content is transmitted in an engaging mixture of videos, animated content, lectures, hands-on exercises, and quizzes."
Register here
7th Edition of the DLR/ESA open PolinSAR training course 2024 [link]
"This PolInSAR course is an online, hands-on course that aims to develop an understanding of the information content of multi-parameter SAR data in an interactive way, without assuming any prior/background knowledge – though some knowledge in Python programming is welcome.
It is organised around 11 sessions over 11 weeks, with lectures and tutorials ranging from SAR image formation up to tomographic processing. In the last module, students will be introduced to the official BIOMASS mission processor and learn how to work with it."
Deadline for applications: 20th March 2024, at 13:00 CET
Call for papers
African EO Challenges and Solutions in Water Scarcity and Food Security – Mapping the Environment [link]
"The call is out for the Elsevier "International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation" special edition on : African EO Challenges and Solutions in Water Scarcity and Food Security – Mapping the Environment."
Lots of interesting stuff this week. That INSAT image is spectacular.