Spectral Reflectance Newsletter #9

Weekly newsletter on Earth Observation

Level-2 News

Artemis 1’s water vapor plume is caught in this animation from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) GOES East satellite on Nov. 16, 2022. Credit: NOAA

Epic Artemis 1 moon rocket launch spotted streaking through Earth’s atmosphere in satellite image [link]
NOAA GOES East satellite captured NASA’s Artemis 1 launch to the moon.

Sentinel-5P data used in new methane detection system [link]
Sentinel-5P carries the Tropomi instrument. which maps traces gases. Currently, it’s the only satellite providing methane measurements daily and at a global scale, making it crucial to The Methane Alert and Response System (MARS). MARS, launched at the 27th United Nations Climate Change Conference, is a data-to-action platform set up as part of the UNEP International Methane Emissions Observatory (IMEO) strategy to get policy-relevant data into the right hands for emissions mitigation.

Representation of Earth’s Digital Twin. Credit: NVIDIA

Lockheed Martin, NVIDIA to Help US Speed Climate Data to Researchers [link]
“The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration selects Lockheed Martin and NVIDIA to build a prototype digital twin of Earth to accelerate environmental monitoring and prediction, including climate research.”

A selection of visualizations created with the custom scripts submitted to the second round of the Sentinel Hub Custom Script Contest. Check also this blog post for more information. Credit: SentinelHub

The Winning Ideas of the Sentinel Hub Climate Change Custom Script Contest [link]
The post features the winning entries for the latest SentinelHub Custom Script Contest. This year, the contest aimed to demonstrate the power of Earth Observation (EO) data in helping detect the effects of climate change.

The first satellites launched by Uganda and Zimbabwe aim to improve life on the ground [link]
“On 7 November 2022 Zimbabwe and Uganda launched their first satellites. 
The launch of these satellites can be seen as a milestone for the efforts in space activities for Zimbabwe and Uganda, supporting mineral exploration, monitoring of environmental hazards and droughts, human settlement and disease outbreak mapping, and other potential fields of applications.
Both Uganda’s PearlAfricaSat-1 and Zimbabwe’s ZimSat-1 are part of the BIRDS-5 constellation; a constellation of CubeSats, and a project led by the Graduate school of Engineering of the Kyushu Institute of Technology, Japan.”

Related: Zimbabwe and Uganda Launched Their First Satellites: ZimSat-1 and PearlAfricaSat-1 [link]

Competitions

NASA Harvest Field Boundary Detection Challenge [link]
Can you detect field boundaries for Rwandan smallholder farmers in a satellite image dataset?
Radiant Earth Foundation, together with the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS), USAID and NASA Harvest, have launched the NASA Harvest Field Boundary Detection Challenge. 
The goal is to classify crop field boundaries using multispectral observations collected by PlanetScope, available through the NICFI basemaps program.

Competition closes on 26 February 2023.

The BioMassters; Measure Aboveground biomass (ABGM) using Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 images [link]
The goal of this challenge, hosted by Mathworks, is to estimate the yearly biomass of different sections in Finland’s forests using imagery from Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2.

Competition closes on 27 January 2023.

Developer’s Orbit

Crop type classification with satellite imagery [link]
Follow this post to learn how folks at Quantum used multitemporal images from Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 to train a UNet + CLSTM model for crop type classification.

Datasets

New worldwide dataset captures the planet in fine detail [link]
The WorldStrat dataset covers nearly 10,000 km² of Earth’s surface and consists of 4,000 high-resolution SPOT images (1.5 m/pixel) matched with 64,000 Sentinel-2 low-resolution images (10 m/pixel). Each SPOT image was temporally matched with 16 Sentinel images.

Although the most obvious application is the development of Super-Resolution methods, there are more potential uses of this dataset.

For more, follow the WorldStrat dataset website: https://worldstrat.github.io/

River discharge and related historical data from the Global Flood Awareness System [link]
tthe Global Flood Awareness System (GloFAS) dataset provides a modelled time series of gridded river discharge. It was produced by forcing a hydrological modelling chain with ERA5 meteorological reanalysis data, interpolated to the GloFAS resolution, produced at a 24-hourly timestep.

Cloud to Street — Microsoft (C2S-MS) flood dataset [link]
“The C2S-MS Floods Dataset is a dataset of global flood events with labeled Sentinel-1 & Sentinel-2 pairs. There are 900 sets (1800 total) of near-coincident Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 chips (512 x 512 pixels) from 18 global flood events. Each chip contains a water label for both Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2, as well as a cloud/cloud shadow mask for Sentinel-2. The dataset was constructed by Cloud to Street in collaboration with and funded by the Microsoft Planetary Computer team.”

Map (a) shows the MERIT Hydro DEM for an area of 13×11 km in north-west Italy, and (b–i) show the base and network layers of Hydrography90m. The sea is depicted in dark grey. The outlets are shown in panel (h) as red points. Credit: Giuseppe Amatulli et al.

Hydrography90m: a new high-resolution global hydrographic dataset [link]

Hydrography90m on the GEE community catalog [link]
Hydrography90m [YouTube link]

Interesting reads

Why satellite imagery is the key to ocean monitoring [link]
Follow this article to learn how satellite imagery has changed ocean monitoring by providing observations on a global scale; from weather monitoring & forecast to tracking marine traffic and from measuring sea level rise to supporting disaster response.

This data image shows the monthly average sea surface temperature for May 2015. Between 2013 and 2016, a large mass of unusually warm ocean water — nicknamed the blob — dominated the North Pacific, indicated here by red, pink, and yellow colors signifying temperatures as much as three degrees Celsius (five degrees Fahrenheit) higher than average. Data are from the NASA Multi-scale Ultra-high Resolution Sea Surface Temperature (MUR SST) Analysis product. (Courtesy NASA Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Archive Center)

6 Years Later, Marine Life Still Hasn’t Recovered From The Monstrous Ocean Heat Blob [link]
Read the articles listed to learn more about “the Blob”; a heated mass of water that developed off of Alaska in 2013. By summer of 2014 the Blob had stretched as far as Mexico, prompting extended algae blooms that shut down much of the Pacific fishing industry and haddevastating impact to marine life.

Follow the links to learn more:
The Blob (EarthData) [link]
A Mass of Hot Water Called ‘The Blob’ Ravaged Oceans in 2015. Will It Happen Again? [link]

Smoke from bushfires burning in Victoria’s Great Dividing Range (Credit: NASA; via Getty Images)

How satellite data is key to saving our forests and tackling climate change [link]

Learning

PANGEO Fall 2022 Showcase Webinar Series [link]
I’ve only recently found about The PANGEO Showcase Webinar Series; They are mostly technical and cover tools and libraries and standards related to the PANGEO Ecosystem. 
They record them and upload the recordings and related material to zenodo. 
Although the Fall 22 Series is the latest one, in the same link you can find all the archived showcases.

ECMWF–ESA Workshop on Machine Learning for Earth Observation and Prediction [link]
Recordings, slides and posters are already available on the workshop website!