IEOS10

IEOS10 coming up, looking forward to it. Hosted by UCC at the NMCI this year.

ERC Starting Grant 2017

Finally putting this ERC Grant Writing class to good use. I have two papers sans supervisor, five journal papers, the novel methodology, the two years post PhD and have been working hard to improve my CV since the previous post. Lots of out-of-hours work ahead aiming for the early review September deadline and the final October deadline.

Lay on McDuff.

Crowd Sourcing Atmospheric Corrections

An interesting idea being tested out by Digital Globe - crowd sourcing image corrections. They are testing new correction algorithms and want feedback on how they are performing. For something that should be so boring it was actually quite addictive - had to drag myself away from it after 10 or so images.

It will be alright on the night

Despite the misty rain, strong winds and low lying cloud in Longford, the cloud in between there and Dublin and the confirmed cloud over Maynooth University (only about 20km from the coast) the flight went ahead due to some promising reports from the crew in Dublin bay. We emerged from the cloud at around 13:30 to glorious sunshine at Dublin City - here is a pic taken by us as we were in a holding pattern over Poolbeg towers waiting for Dublin ATC to route us in for the flight lines. We recorded RGB, Thermal, Multispec and Hyperspec imagery in 3 flight lines (that is all ATC would allow us). The boat crew from DCU were out in the bay since 8am so the aerial survey and the boat survey coincided perfectly.

The satellite portion of the survey was less fortunate - unsurprisingly so as this is Ireland. Although you can see from this image that there were some breaks in the cloud all over Leinster - the satellite overpass coincided with a block of cloud sitting over Dublin.

Surveying in Ireland.

It would break your heart.

Months (literally) of planning - cancellations, rescheduling - trying to get a satellite overpass, an aerial survey and a boat transect all to coincide with good weather (this is Ireland, I know!). Boats and planes booked to coincide with a Landsat 8 overpass later today - the boat crew have been out in Dublin Bay since 7:30am, but the cloud won't lift to give us enough altitude to get under it. Watching the weather all week it seemed we could get a break at lunchtime and still might - but sitting in the aerodrome now looking at the Metars 

METAR EIDW 280730Z 21008KT 6000 -RADZ FEW005 BKN010 BKN020 16/14 Q1009 TEMPO 5000

which partly translates to:

Few clouds at 500 feet (200m)
Broken clouds at 1,000 feet (300m)
Broken clouds at 2,000 feet (600m)

means the gap may get pushed on. Anyway, lets hope! And we still have to deal with ATC in the bay...

Calibration and Test Flights of Sensor Pod 2.0

NCG are starting into a new flying season this week. Between us (all of the staff at the NCG) we have Precision Ag, Forestry,  Seaweed, Slick Mapping, Bathymetry and Coastal Erosion to survey and capture data for. RPAS (Drones) are great but when you see the amount of ground we covered in our early calibration and test flights (with different landcover types in Cork, Longford and Carlow being covered) you can quickly see that RPAS are not suitable for covering those distances.

We flew approx 750km in 4.5 hours with multiple flight lines at each location - multispectral recording continuously and RGB, Hyperspectral and Thermal recorded at specific sites. I did my PhD with data from about 100m of road - this is enough for alot of PhDs...

Sentinel 1 gets political

A strange choice of image for thejournal.ie to use for a borderpoll! or is it....

This is the image that I posted about a few months back - a multi-temporal SAR colour composite of land coverage across the island created by ESA.