Monday 18 August 2014

It will be alright on the night, part 2!!

I posted a few months back about the new show John Creedon was doing, "Creedon's Weather"




and how we had been asked to bring the Falcon down to Limerick and Kerry for two studies. One was identifying areas of windfall in a forest in Limerick and the second was measuring coastal erosion at Dunbeg ringfort in Kerry. Well the show started to air last week and the forestry part was shown this week (considering we couldn't fly in the strong wind at the fort I'm guessing that will be all from us!!).

Here's a screenshot the two of us, Tim flying the expensive piece of equipment and me doing a great job as clipboard guy.





And here's the link to the full show for anyone interested. Also interviewed - Barry Fennell, Enterprise Ireland, and also the Irish representative with ESA.

Thursday 14 August 2014

1.21 Gigawatts!!

OK in this case I should be saying, "31cm resolution?? 31CM RESOLUTION!!!" But I couldn't resist the doc brown reference.



WorldView 3, the successor to WorldView2 that I posted about for the Whale study in June (it has the coastal blue band) has just gone into orbit. It usually takes these systems quite a while to get calibrated, come online, start releasing accurate data - but when it does, WorldView 3 will be returning images at a spatial resolution of 31cm. It mentions 31cm in the headline, 31cm further down in the text but then states it will be 41cm in panchromatic mode. Panchromatic images are (always?) sharper than those returned from the multispectral sensors on a satellite, so I'm guessing that's a typo and it really is 31cm. The UAVs I posted about a few months back that fly at around 120m AGL are returning amazing resolution orthoimages - 5cm ground sampling distance - but WorldView3 is in SPACE! WorldView 3 is the new benchmark for spatial resolution. No images yet - but I can't wait to see them.

This is only possible because the US Gov lifted a ban recently prohibiting sale of images sharper than 50cm to anyone but the US Gov. Or was it the DoD?


Wednesday 13 August 2014

IEOS Abstract call announced

First call for oral or poster abstracts for the IEOS was announced recently.

8th Irish Earth Observation Symposium 2014 http://ieos2014.com/
First call for abstracts – closing date 5pm, Friday September 19th 2014
The theme of the symposium is “New opportunities in Earth Observation”. Abstracts (maximum 300 words) can be submitted as a word document or pdf to the conference organising committee at info@ieos2014.com.  Please indicate whether you wish to be considered for an oral or poster submission, and include your full contact details. Postgraduate students are particularly encouraged to attend, and there will be prizes for the best oral and poster presentations from postgraduate students.

Tuesday 12 August 2014

Fly radar

Interesting post in the news last week on RADAR. It's well known that RADAR can be used for weather monitoring. Applications like Met Eireann's rainfall radar limit the chances of getting a soaking on a short walk to the shops (vital in Ireland!).



What is maybe not as well known to most people is that RADAR signals can be polarized, and that dual polarization RADAR can help to gauge the size of hail, rain drops and snowdrops. I'm not a Meteorologist, but I assume that

big drops = a soaking.                                                     (1)




But this was the first example I had seen of it being used to monitor insects.

Important notes: (A) they don't specify that it's dual polarized RADAR and (B) I'm sure it's been used to monitor insects for years - but DPol sounded most likely and insect monitoring hadn't caught my attention before!



The amount of insects - Mayfly in this case - that must be present to register that strongly is hard to imagine. They explode, seem to start in the south and end up in the North (a temperature difference maybe?) and are gone just as quickly. Mayfly spend most of their life underwater and only surface for one day to breed and then die. Here's a photo that should demonstrate the type of numbers they were looking at...


Cool visualisation!



Friday 1 August 2014

The h Bomb

My days of auto-googling and looking for any citations manually are no more. I signed up to Google scholar and now I have been told that my h-index is 4 and my i-index is 1 linky.  I also (I think) have been shown all my citations.





It is interesting seeing what papers got the most references. I'm only a named author on my top paper, from a conference but the journal paper I had published as first author a few months back has no references. Hopefully that will change soon! Also, one of my RSPSoc conference papers isn't even listed - it was on UAVs. One of my other RSPSoc papers is listed, and it's my oldest and probably worst paper because I had little or no results in it as I was just starting the PhD then. It also had a result in it that I disproved in the next paper!! But it got referenced, and then someone else robbed that persons references list, and someone else robbed theirs, and now it's my best performing paper. Some people citing me clearly haven't read my papers, and I don't mean they misunderstood a complex element of it - I mean they had used it totally out of context (i don't care, I'll take it!).

It's also interesting the slow stepping of the references, not a hot topic by the looks of things.

papers published in 2012 - 3 citations
..............................2011 - 4
..............................2010- 5

I didn't know any of this yesterday but now I do and it bothers me, I want more!! Especially once i heard h-index was used in a recent interview shortlisting process. So I looked online for ways to improve your h-index.



Their top tip? Self reference! Slip in as many as you can. I have referenced my own work in the past as I thought it was required, paper 1,2,3 etc were steps on the road to paper 4. Referencing them was required, or I would have to either included the explanations again in paper 4 or else just ignore a gaping hole in the knowledge!

I can see how self referencing would be taking advantage of, it seems a bit shoddy...

About Me

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My name is Conor. I am a Lecturer at the Department of Geography at Maynooth University. These few lines will (hopefully) chart my progress through academia and the world of research.