The flow

It is always interesting when you have an idea in your mind but when someone explains it properly it really makes sense. Take the idea of, 'job satisfaction'. People are moving more and more from their jobs, a 'job for life' is a thing of the past in most cases.

 I left a permanent job to do my PhD and then move into research. Why? It's hard to explain - but then I came across this article on linkedin. A pictures is worth a thousand words right?

So I suppose everyone has to find their own 'flow channel', that sweetspot where you balance boredom and anxiety. I'm sure there will be outliers, i.e. days when you are way out of your depth on something, or watching the clock crawl towards 5pm - but this graph really stuck a chord with me.

8th IEOS

We are hosting the 8th Annual Irish Earth observation Symposium thi syear. We timed to conincide with NUIM study week so we could have free access to the big hall, plus lecture rookms for break oaway sessions. It's going to run on Thursday 30th (all-day) and Friday 31st October (half-day). The symposium will enable researchers, academia, industry and employees of public bodies to present the state of the art in Irish remote sensing and identify potential collaborations. 

In addition to the traditional presentation/poster sessions, this year's symposium will also incorporate parallel workshops. These workshops will range from software demonstrations, to the introduction of new data sets, through to the procedure for applying for ESA imagery. Hardware demonstrations will be carried out in the symposium intervals, involving instruments such as UASs, Helikites, handheld laser scanners, Remotely Operated Underwater Vehicles (ROVs) and Mobile Mapping Systems (MMSs). Hopefully we will have 4 or 5 MMS on the day, our own, plus a few from our industry partners and Irish industry. A number of international keynote speakers will be invited to open the event. These will include personnel from ESA, multinational data providers and innovators in the field of spatial data capture, management and processing.

Early working version of the website is here!

Linky

Remote Sensing Journals

Thanks to the IEOS Blog for pointing this out. Google Scholar have released updated info on the Citation Index- ranking Journals for the h-index 2013. 'Remote Sensing' is the sister journal of 'Sensors' that I had a paper published in a few weeks back. It's very interesting to see it doing so well, out-ranking more traditional journals like PE&RS and The Photogrammetric Record by quite a long way. I submitted a paper to Remote Sensing today - fingers crossed.

1.	Remote Sensing of Environment	75	98
2.	IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing	65	90
3.	ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing	39	56
4.	International Journal of Remote Sensing	36	46
5.	IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters	33	46
6.	Remote Sensing	31	41
7.	International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation	30	43
8.	IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing	29	41
9.	Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing	26	41
10.	IEEE Radar Conference	21	31
11.	IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium	20	28
12.	International Journal of Digital Earth	19	31
13.	Journal of Applied Remote Sensing	19	27
14.	Canadian Journal of Remote Sensing	17	25
15.	The Photogrammetric Record	15	18
16.	European Conference on Synthetic Aperture Radar	14	19
17.	GIScience & Remote Sensing	13	17
18.	Remote Sensing Letters	12	21
19.	Photogrammetrie-Fernerkundung-Geoinformation	12	17
20.	Geocarto International	12	15

ESA Third Party Mission data

One of the first steps that was required in the SFI bathymetry project that I posted about recently was to find  free data. We had agreed at the kick-off meeting that three parameters were essential, primarily due to findings from the pilot Dublin bay study. These were:

1) The imagery had to coincide with the LiDAR calibration datasets

2) The imagery had to have a blue band

3) The imagery had to be of higher resolution than 30m.

 Of particular relevance to my previous post was point 2, where scientists used a coastal blue band to look for submerged whales.

Satellites that have a 'coastal blue' band like Worldview 2 or Landsat 8 can penetrate water to greater depths than those that are restricted to the traditional blue portion of the spectrum.

Anyway - these 3 requirements were quite restrictive when matching the datasets with imagery and most of the free datasets had to be eliminated. The industry partner, TWM suggested I contact the European Space Agency (ESA) representative, who is an employee of Enterprise Ireland and see could we get some free ESA data for the project.

This was an excellent idea so I completed and submitted a, 'Third Party Mission' application and after some toing and froing we were granted access to, and a quota for, imagery from two commercial satellites - RapidEye and SPOT. Although SPOT doesn't have a blue band - it will allow us to to test the importance of the blue band for turbid waters - the findings of in the literature seem to imply that the green band is rpeferable for turbid waters and Irish waters are certainly that. plus it's always useful to have an extra dataset. So now we have some Landsat 5 imagery, RapidEye and SPOT.

Whales

Nature. Animals. I love it/them.

Using satellite images to help either - even better. I came across this great paper using WorldView-2 images like this

they were able to locate and track whales in the ocean. Worldview-2 has a 'coastal blue' band which i have mentioned a few times - in this case it has helped them to spot submerged whales.

The image below demonstrates a surfaced whale and also a submerged whale. Only the coastal blue band spotted it!

VRS link to UAS

One of the reasons I got involved in the COST action was that they were going to look at ways of improving UAS navigation accuracy during the mission, not just using ground control and post processing once you were back in the office. I had met MaVinci UAS vendors at Survey Ireland this year who were selling a Sirius Pro

which had a base station link and could negate the need for ground control, but I wasn't sure was this just providing high accuracy Geotags that would then be used in post-processing the data. Either way it was impressive....

Today - SenseFly (the guys who almost started the survey UAS craze with the Swinglet) launched the latest version of the eBee, the eBee RTK

Which not only has a base station link, but also works by VRS. VRS is something most surveyors will be familiar with, it is a mobile phone/internet, 'virtual reference station' that provides the GNSS receiver with real time corrections from the local active station network. In Ireland that's operated by OSi, although a number of vendors have created their own to ensure they could have them where they wanted them and to avoid problems if OSi took the off-line for any reason. Added to that - they very clearly state that real time corrections are being transmitted to the UAV mission planning software and the flight plan is being updated constantly. This is particularly important for UASs operating the push broom type of spectrometer, where post processing or image matching is not an easy option.

SFI Industry Fellowships

We were informed of our awards back in October 2013, but the official announcement was only made yesterday.

I was one of the lucky ones called for the SFI photoshoot with the minister and was up early getting suited and booted when I got a congratulatory text informing me that my surname had been mangled on Newstalk (no surprise there).

The projects are listed around 9:40 here Newstalk Podcast

I got a mention (probably because I was also going to be at the photoshoot), as did Tim McCarthy and TreeMetrics.

The project also got a mention here, here, here and here.

So we went in for the photoshoot and the full press release was released yesterday PM here.