There are very few days go by that satellite data or remote sensing is not mentioned in the news. You might need to look hard at the article as its often just a brief mention - supporting some other big announcement - but is usually the key enabling technology. Glaciers retreating, forest fires in the amazon, some unfortunate animal under threat - but inevitably you will see 'satellite data' mentioned, either one of the big free datasets like Copernicus or Landsat, or some of the high resolution vendors like Digitalglobe.
The latest in the Irish media is a reference to Ireland's need of a good land cover/land use map, as we have been making do with
CORINE to date with according issues relating to accuracy, resolution, class type,etc. The good news is that there is a collaboration between the EPA, Teagasc, OSi and others underway to develop new landuse datasets to fill this hole - using OSi high resolution multiband aerial images and combining these with the high temporalresolution of the Sentinel satellites. I've been involved on some land cover mapping with OSi on the change detection project, and when presenting this work at IEOS2019 in Teagasc before christmas the previous speakers were the EPA/Osi and the new datasets look great. Watch this space as land use maps will feed into pretty much every monitoring or assessment task you can imagine. Accurate, regularly updated land use maps (that's where the satellites come in) can predict and prevent pollution, flooding, effects caused by climate change, urban sprawl, poor agricultural practices, you name it.
And keep an eye out for space data in the news - it is there almost every day.
