Rohingya Crisis and EO

I see the Rohingya are back in the news again, after almost all of them turned down an offer of repatriation - satellite imagery is helping monitor the expansion of refugee camps in Bangladesh and other countries where they ended up, plus the razing of their old villages. Most interesting/horrifying was to see that all the work that has gone ahead on Bashan Char (not Thengar Char as originally reported - some confusion on what soggy mud island we were looking at confused everyone). Ive posted about this before on twitter, but look at the gif below from thenewhumanitatiarn.org to see it yourself.

And if you want to see just how precarious living on this island is - look at this map and this map produced by ESA showing how often parts of the island are under water. And that is without rising sea levels..

The Rohignya will be housed right at the edge of that red line, which if you notice in the second image from ESA is only 'land surface' about 81% of the time. That's a lot of flooding.

Fake News Makes it Way to EO

The director of the Brazilian National Space Research Institute (INPE) has been sacked for presenting results from satellite imagery showing severe deforestation under the current Government, and then arguing their accuracy following official criticism. The data was just added to a dashboard on a government website - no big splash was made of the news, but still it caught the government's attention. The President and ministers said it was all 'lies' and that INPE was in the pocket of a 'foreign not for profit group'. The environment minister is claiming many of those spots have been showing as deforestation for years in 'their data' - but has not released the data nor the methodology to refute the INPE claims.

BIM From Space - Part 2

BIM From a Distance - Part 2 is out now in the Summer edition of the Surveyors Journal - what more could you want on the hottest day of the summer so far!? Take a look now to find out how the SCSI port mapping study story ends - spoiler alert - the satellite did it.

God, i'd love an ice-pop.

National Space Strategy Published

The National Space Strategy Consultation of July 2018 got some useful info and feedback - as part of the SCSI RS & EO working group we provided feedback from the mapping/built environment/property sectors - and the follow up meeting in August was an interesting experience with lots of stakeholders gathered to voice their opinions. The culmination of all this work resulted in the launch yesterday by Minister Halligan of the first National Space Strategy for Ireland 2019 - 2025. Plenty of food for thought and the section on upskilling in particular caught my eye following a recent SFI Discovery submission.

Drone Industry Day - Maynooth University

Thanks to Tim and the team for a very interesting day of talks on North Campus. Beginning with an update on the rapidly approaching European Drone Regs - and followed by speakers discussing things ranging from Manna (the best name ever for a drone food delivery company) to ways to stop wifi, radio or GPS piloted rogue drones - i got plenty of food for thought. One of the tools shown on the video was a giant electromagnetic gun that can fry a drones circuit-board from quite a distance.. Advances in UTM are one to watch and one of the early speakers told us that the first apartment (i can't remember if its an apartment or a block of apartments) built in London with its own drone delivery pad is opening tomorrow. The times they are a-changing...

New Drones @ Department of Geography

Took delivery of two drones this morning.

One is a Parrott Bluegrass - a rugged, out of the box rotary drone with a forward facing oblique RGB camera and a nadir looking Parrott Sequioa. A very nice piece of kit, eliminates many of the issues I spoke about before with bespoke integration mounts for sensors on the DJI series.

The other is a  fixed wing - covers a much wider area and has RGB capability via a canon camera.

Looking forward to testing these two out - need to renew my SOP and license and then up, up and away.....

EUGEO - CIG2019

A big congrats to the team at NUIG for hosting such a great event - some really interesting talks over the 4 days and some nice weather for a trip to Galway. The EO session went well, Daithí and I had some really interesting speakers in a dual session - everything from satellite SAR to Drone photogrammetry.

That's it for 2019 - commiserations to Cian and team at Trinity who are hosting it next year.