2016 - A year in review

Not a bad year overall and thanks to the readers of the blog.

A new team member, 3 peer reviewed journal papers accepted, awarded over €200k in funding, one project finished, one project approaching successful conclusion, a new project kicking off in Mar 2017, an ERC application submitted, multiple conference and workshop presentations, an MSc class graduated, 3 trade journal articles, an RPAS consumer guide and some big Copernicus news to be announced in the new year from Tim.

Roll on 2017 and lets see if we can get even more done.

Christmas Tree Revetment

What a great use of old Christmas trees. These are placed along coastal or river regions experiencing erosion and help the native grass (maram or otherwise) to take hold again and keep the bank together. The example in the link is for the River Dee and fisheries board - I have not come across many examples of this applied in coastal regions in Ireland although plenty online for the US. I wonder is their any harmful side introducing that many Christmas trees to a river area - like changing the pH of the soil. Possible that only happens with live Pine.

The Fall of Hyperion

Bad news on the Hyperion front. 

I posted in a burst of enthusiasm earlier in the year about free satellite hyperspectral datasets that I had found for Ireland. The Hyperion sensor on the EO-1 satellite was recording long strips over agricultural areas in Munster and Connaught. NASA had even agreed to let users request it to capture new sites of interest - which i did almost immediately for a number of our coastal projects around the country. Unfortunately due to a GPS malfunction on the satellite and also I am presuming problems with cloud cover, none of my coastal test sites were ever successfully mapped. Really disappointing as this would have been an invaluable source of hyperspectral imagery for Ireland. To make matters worse - we won't have a chance for a repeat request as the satellite is being decommissioned this month. 

No more free hyperspectral satellite tasking for geospatial researchers.

Propaganda Maps from the 20th Century

Some excellent WW1 and WW2 propaganda maps here compiled by the National Geographic - you really need a monitor to appreciate them - it won't load properly on a phone. I could look at these for hours, there is just so much going on. Would be nice prints for a wall.

What is in the hands of "Ireland" in this WW1 one? A bottle for sure - but what are the tweezers? 

Portugal looks quite content in this one - only country in Europe that is.

And is this rifle supposed to be a scale bar?

Drone Prosecutions

At any of the UAV/UAS/RPAS/SUA/Drone events one of the major talking points has been regulation and prosecution of unlicensed operators. This is a major concern, whether it was at the kick off meet of the UAAI, or the SCSi Working Group on RPAS, or at Survey Ireland, or Drone X. Each week videos pop up on youtube which have been captured in clearly unsafe conditions, by unlicensed operators. This understandably annoys the operators who are playing by the rules and the example is regularly given of Director A who needs 30 seconds of aerial footage for the next episode of their show but needs it this week. They ask Operator A who has a license but cannot get the required permissions in time. He regrettably turns it down,. Operator B who has no insurance, no regard for safety or proper operating procedure gets the 30 seconds of footage and so the business. The word on the street was that a prosecution was coming - but the news broke in the last few weeks that the DPP thought a drone prosecution was too heavy handed. This makes me concerned that we will not get on top of regulation any time soon and the people who play by the rules will be the losers. We have had a drone crash - total IMU failure - and others will too so these safety procedures are essential. As a colleague of mine regularly says - "if you have never crashed your drone you're not flying enough".

I remember coming up to Christmas last year the rush to get the new regs in place as the IAA were expecting a flurry of drone purchases over the holidays (I even saw one for sale in the pound shop). It seems over 6,000 drones have been registered in 2016 alone! 

Hydro International article online

Our article on 'Improving satellite derived bathymetry' is now online. This covers some of the work with GSI and TechWorks Marine but also the more recent INFOMAR shortcall 2015 results.

Kildare FM

Of course it wouldn't be Christmas without my annual call with Kildare FM about our role in 'mapping for santa'. Tune in tomorrow at 14:20 to hear all about it.

Flood Damage 2015

What a difference a year makes. Sun outside, hardly any rain in weeks - cold, with a little mist  - basically typically beautiful Christmas weather on the north campus (although I am aware that there are weather warnings in place for later in the week - so this does not count as jinxing us).

December 2015 saw me fleeing a Sci:Comm conference in Athlone at the head of some of the wettest weather for winter on record, resulting in the activation of the Copernicus Emergency Mapping Scheme for areas along the Shannon catchment and elsewhere on the 8th December 2015. Readers of this blog might have come across some of the work we did on flooding this year, demo-ing the capabilities of EO data and the archive of Copernicus Emergency Mapping in articles for the SCSI Surveyors Journal and RICS Land Journal, but also in three conference presentations and a Society of Chartered Surveyors CPD talk. I came across an interesting post yesterday on Irish Economy blog summarising the financial cost of the event quite well.

"Counting the cost of last winter’s flooding: Evidence from disruptions to the road network"

Some sobering statistics on the cost of that one event (albeit a prolonged one) and great use of maps and distance/travel metrics to display the financial cost of the flooding to commutes etc.

Galileo goes live

Great news for people standing in the rain doing fieldwork - the EU constellation of positioning satellites (Galielo) are now  offering initial services which adds to the existing GNSS constellations like GPS and GLONASS, etc. More satellites means better accuracy (no more 'poor PDOP' - an in-joke if you've ever used a Trimble rover), less chance of dropping below the minimum required to calculate 3D position and faster initialisation times too so you can get out of the rain even sooner. With eighteen satellites in orbit now they need 24 for the full constellation (2 failed in launch on a Soyuz rocket early in 2016) and will be adding to functionality over the coming years.

Anyone interested in more detail on GNSS satellite orbits - I recommend this neat webpage - stuff in space. If you search for Sentinel 2a, Meteosat and Galileo you will see examples of three main orbits, polar (low earth orbit), geostationary and the one that Galileo is in, a medium earth orbit.

Paper Accepted for Publication - Environment and Planning B

The outputs from this year really are clumped in the final two months - two papers and two funding awards - but I suppose that's down to chance with a paper review process of undefined duration and also two funding decision deadlines at the end of the year.

We've just been informed that after some minor revisions our ESPON paper, "Data Imputation in a Short-Run Space-Time Series: A Bayesian Approach" has been accepted for publication in "Environment and Planning B". I will post a link when I get it.

Change Detection - Funding Success

More good news on the funding front - although like the previous post not formally announced yet. Approx €150k for a 2 year study looking at change detection and change classification combining orthoimagery, image-derived point clouds and remotely sensed satellite imagery.

More to follow.

Port Management - Funding Success

I was successful in a recent funding call - approx €60k for applications of RS data/GIS/decision support tools for port management/marine spatial planning in Dublin bay. This will involve working with a Dublin-based planning company on the project and runs for two years.

More to follow.

New Paper Published

The final paper demonstrating the potential of MIMIC for optimising Mobile Laser Scanning System configurations,

"Improving MMS Performance during Infrastructure Surveys through Geometry Aided Design"

has just been published. We never used the VQ-250 for coastal surveys - but i would love to have had that dataset for validation against the drone surface models we made for the dune erosion in Portrane in 2012. 300,000 points per second! A coastal erosion study would have been the ideal test case for MIMIC - using the software to find the optimal FOV and scanner orientation to provide maximum point density on the dunes - concentrate all sensors on one side of the system for a single pass at the right tide level.

LiDAR as Art 2017

The final five LiDAR as Art finalists are up online for voting and you can back your favourite here. My favourite is the, 'inside looking out' entry. Considering that the theme is 'winter solstice - personally I think we missed a trick here in Ireland not entering a scan of Newgrange or one of the other passage tombs in Brú na Bóinne. These tombs are over 5000 years old and specifically designed to channel the light on the summer and winter solstices! We'd have been a shoe in.

Newgrange - Discovery Programme 3D Icons project

Passage and chamber at Newgrange designed to channel light into the chamber at the winter solstice.

3D scans of the whole site and passage chamber available here from the always excellent Discovery Programme.

Google Earth Timelapse

There is a great example doing the rounds on social media at present of the power of satellite imagery for mapping changes in the landscape. Google Earth Timelapse combines all of the available archive Landsat digital imagery (from approximately 1980 on so I'm guessing L4 is the earliest) to present almost 40 years of continuous imagery for looking at changes in the landscape. The really powerful thing is that this is available in a web broswer for anywhere in the world.  Just zoom, pan and move the slider. No processing or RS knowledge needed to use it.

See the excellent example below - changes in the course of the river in Tibet over the period.

40 years of Landsat data for river monitoring 

I looked for Irish examples but even changes in Dublin through the Celtic tiger era are a bit hard to make out, partly because we get so many cloudy days and there is therefore less data for a smooth animation. Line banding on the Landsat 5 sensors in Dublin bay also makes it look a bit messy. The construction of the islands in Dubai is well worth a look to get you started.

Poverty and Satellite Data

I love when I come across examples of data that I would usually discard being used by other scientists in their research. Optical imagery captured at night would be of limited use to me - but I can think of a few practical applications without too much bother if I could see the urban areas in it (urban sprawl, light pollution, thermal band for heat loss, etc). The value of optical imagery captured at night, with no urban areas in it at all was less obvious to me, but some clever folks at Oxford have come up with a collaboration between economists and remote sensers and used satellite imagery and GIS to develop a metric for counting poverty globally based on the number of people living in darkness at night. The famous photo of North Korea between South Korea and China taking from the space shuttle giving one example - the capital, Pyongyang visible as the bright hub in the centre of the darkness. 

Note - I have seen this research attributed to both Stanford and Oxford - I picked the Oxford link for this post.

Citizen Science and Google Earth Outreach

Part of the slick mapping project we are working on for the iCRAG Marine Spoke is to develop a method for locating, classifying and quantifying slicks in Irish Coastal Waters. We use remote sensing to find the slick and measure the spatial extents - but to help with the classification element - i.e. is it a natural or anthropegenic seep, what material is it - we can really benefit from having additional contextual GIS information to combine with the spectral information in the satellite imagery. There is a wealth of GIS data that we can use, giving environmental, meteorological, geological, legal, petroleum industry, fisheries layers etc and this has all been brought into the MAROBS platform that we are developing for spatial analysis. What we do not have is free access to the automatic identification system (AIS) on vessels, so if we find a seep we cannot check that against the mapping and position of shipping at the time the slick was sighted to see if it is possible pollution, blowing tanks, etc. We can pick up ships in the Sentinel 1 SAR imagery, but it is just a snapshot and we do not know the direction of travel - so the AI would be really useful. This is particularly useful when looking at motion of slicks in the spatial tests because if a slick recurs in a single location over time, it is very possibly a seep, and not a spill.

Example plot with AIS data included for Dublin port approaches

So in the course of my search for a similar, free, GIS-friendly dataset I was interested to see on the news recently that Leonardo DiCaprio launched a citizen science platform for tracking fishing vessels and monitoring illegal fishing.

Interpolated heatmap of fishing activity for a week in Irish coastal waters

I signed up, followed the link and it seems that this and are other excellent examples of citizen science being undertaken by the Google Earth Outreach team - one looking at fishing and the other looking at deforestation. The goal is to have citizens help monitor fishing vessels that are fishing where they shouldn't be, or illegal logging in forests around the world. The users can also help contribute in the machine learning part of the project - helping to calibrate the algorithm, as each method has more than a simple yes/no when the feature is spotted.

More information here

EM Spectrum - White Rainbows?

Definitely one to add to the lectures on the EM Spectrum - Fog Bows. Original story taken from BBC News

Explanation from NASA

The fogbow's lack of colors is caused by the smaller water drops ... so small that the wavelength of light becomes important. Diffraction smears out colors that would be created by larger rainbow water drops.

Rural Seminar - 2016

The schedule for the 2016 SCSI Rural Seminar is now online - I (or some fellow called Calahane) will be giving a talk on the potential of new mapping technologies for the rural sector, covering uses of remote sensing (satellite and aerial, both active and passive ) and RPAS for measuring flooding, precision agriculture, land cover and developing surface models for spatial analysis.

Crowdsourcing, spatial skills and 'What have the vikings ever done for us!?'

Here is another excellent case of crowdsourcing. In this example a mobile game helps to gather data for a study on dementia. It tests people's navigation skills in a simple sailing simulation and also their sense of orientation. One interesting finding is that coastal communities appear to have better spatial skills and it is possible these people may have received a genetic boost from viking blood! As a coastal dwelling Irishman, I have presumably benefited from the plentiful viking raids over the years - many of our big cities were founded by them.

Beauty of Maps

Old maps are a beautiful thing in themselves, and although the new GIS-ready vector files are essential for research and efficient processing I have a real soft spot for the old cartographic methods. I would rate nautical charts possibly at the top in terms of an item that links beauty and functionality and I have a large A0 print of the SW Coast of Ireland up on my wall at home. So having explained my soft-spot for maps it should be no surprise then that I was delighted when I came across a post on Twitter recently (I'm @con20or if anyone wants to tweet me) showing someone who reuses old maps and created something even more attractive out of them! An artist named Matthew Cusack takes old maps, and then uses pieces of these to create a collage of natural and human subjects. Have a look at this example of an ocean wave. I would love one of these, but you need to 'contact the gallery' for prices - so I think its a bit out of my price range....

Spatial Data and Ordnance Survey Ireland

Two major announcements from OSi of late, depending on your age/interests I'm not sure which you will find the most impressive!!

1. 5 Star Linked Data - The ERC application that I submitted recently leverages 5 Star Linked data in a big way for data sharing, so it is great to see that the Ireland's first 5 star datasets were released by OSI and the Dept of Public Expenditure and Reform. Now available on data.gov.ie. Linked open data will revolutionise how we share spatial data, linking data in a conceptual and semantic way online. I am really excited to see where this goes.

2. Minecraft - in a big plus for anyone involved in public engagement or demonstrating the many uses of maps and spatial data, large portions of Ireland have been taken from PRIME2 (OSi's spatial data storage model) and converted into Minecraft format. They have dublin city, killarney lakes, Limerick city and others.

Carrauntoohil

Irish Marine Atlas - Excellent GIS/Spatial Data Repository

I recently begin looking at the Irish Marine Atlas in detail to help with the marine spatial planning (MSP) side of the iCRAG slick mapping project. We are combining remotely sensed data with contextual GIS data to help inform classification of slick features. The Marine Atlas (designed by the Marine Institute) is an extensive, exhaustive and easily accessible online portal directing you to pretty much every spatial dataset that a person working in the marine or coastal environment for Ireland could want for any application, whether it is the blue economy, oil and gas, environmental, coastal protection. These datasets all captured by different organisations and using different geospatial technologies but combining them in one location really helps to make this data useable.

Bathymetry in the Economist

Interestingly the Economist has an article mentioning two of the areas of research that I am active in - Bathymetry and Oil Seep mapping. GEBCO (of the bathymetry cookbook fame) have been tasked with collating all available hydrographic data for the ocean floors. They will also leverage mariners (including merchant marine, defence, pleasure boats) to crowd-source more depth measurements as these vessels pass to and fro. . As an interesting note - to survey the oceans with a single vessel - they claim it could take 200 years!!

The article suggests that this will also help locate oil seeps and ore bearing geological features, but isn't quite as clear on how it will do that.

Atlantic Ireland and Geoscience 2016

Busy week for the team on the conference front these last few weeks - IEOS 2016 last week in Cork (Tim), a two day Atlantic Ireland in Dublin for the oil and gas industry this week (Me, Dáire and Tim)  and Geoscience 2016 in Dublin Castle (Me) - we presented some of our satellite and sensor pod stuff for bathymetry and slick mapping at each of these events. Drone X is also on this week (Tim) where we will showcase some of our drone projects and cloud platform development and I don't think any of us are able to make the Coastal TEP meeting unfortunately - just too much stuff on in one week.

One strange thing at the start of the AI conference was the presence of security and the announcement that all attendees and proceedings were being videoed - expecting protesters presumably? 

Image Derived Bathymetry at the INFOMAR Annual Conference

I presented some of our bathymetry results at the INFOMAR conference last week, we'd been using multiple satellite (Landsat 8, Sentinel 2a, RapidEye, Pleiades), airborne (the sensor pod with hyper, multi and RGB) and RPAS RGB imagery to derive bathymetry for a few different test sites around the coast. We'd been looking at different image processing methods to remove errors in the data following on reviewer comments from the Dublin bay paper . These are things such as sunglint, etc - and interestingly the algorithm we used (Hedley et.al) was developed by the same person we then collaborated on during the marine workshop a few weeks back. His background is in coral reef mapping - and these were originally 'errors' for him until he moved into bathymetry. 

Some very interesting talks at the INFOMAR conference and a great turn out - I learned about the some of the shallow, coastal banks which might be suitable for testing SDB away from the influences of the coast. Another interesting talk was from Dan Toal in UL on autonomous drone navigation and landing for getting around LOS restrictions by operating from a mobile nautical platform. A 3D interactive website for viewing shipwrecks and a few things looked good too, including RMS Leinster, built from CAD plans and then related to the multibeam point cloud for the wreck.

And I finally got a go of one of the augmented reality sandboxes. 

ERC

I've been very quiet on the blog front of late - mainly due to a new arrival in the family and also an ERC submission (just gone off this afternoon). I'll have to remedy my lack of posts soon as I'll be presenting slick mapping and satellite bathymetry at a number of conferences in the coming weeks and should have some good info to report back.

Floating LiDAR

Two LiDAR principles that I have just heard about for the first time, floating LiDAR and LiDAR for wind measurements. I had no idea LiDAR could measure wind velocity - more data that I am probably throwing out and that could be reused... Apparently it uses LiDAR doppler shift to measure wind particles and is the next great thing for offshore wind measurements providing more info when choosing a site. I wonder what wavelength LiDAR they use?

Ploughing Championships 2016

I spent most of yesterday afternoon at the Ploughing Championships, peddling my wares at the Chartered Surveyors stand. iCrag had been there the day before, Maynooth University are there all three days and I was the Geomatics representative on the afternoon slot, showcasing some RPAS and satellite applications that could be of use to the rural community. What an event - over 200,000 people in two days and it is almost like a small city.

Here it is (image centre, very bright pixels) doing its best to outshine Tullamore (NE corner of image) on yesterdays Sentinel 1a image. It's Ireland's biggest outdoor event, i understand....

RPAS Consumer Guide

A series of guidelines have just been published by the SCSI working group on RPAS that I am a member of. Consumer guides are designed to inform consumers who might be considering commissioning a RPAS survey for their site of the pros and cons of the method, who they should rely on, what to ask for, etc. RPAS Operations is a highly dynamic regulatory environment and things are already changing since we first began drafting them that will impact significantly.

Still - a good place to start.

Land Journal Article Published

An edited version of the article we wrote for the SCSI  Surveyor's Journal has been picked up and published in the latest edition of the Land Journal, RICS.

Image Registration

Some great data coming in from the different sensor pod surveys. Below is an example of two different images (multispectral and RGB) co-registered using the on-board GPS. We have no IMU on board yet, so this is two different images with two different image capture frequencies and trying to back interpolate off the GPS track so there are obviously going to be errors. The third image (thermal) was registered using matching features in the other images. The thermal camera can provide very low contrast at times, hence the overlap problems to the south with the field boundaries. The fourth image is a hyperspectral FCC for the same area - 100 bands, 600-1000nm.

S2a and Change Detection

Three things came to mind when I saw this article and image.

1) Surprise : A really powerful demonstration of applications of RS, watch progress of the bridge.
2) Impressed : What beautiful colours, and such high res imagery for free!
3) Jealous: Wait a minute.....how many cloud free images have they?? One a month at least..... To the best of my knowledge there is only one good cloud free image of Ireland (June 2016) in the S2a database.

New Paper Published

A new paper with Margaret McCaul as lead author has been published in Sensors. This includes some of the work we did with an early version of the sensor pod over Kinvarra bay.

Mid space debris

With Sentinel 1a playing such a key role in the slick feature mapping project - i have to admit a moment of panic when i saw "COPERNICUS Sentinel-1a satellite hit by space particle" in my twitter feed. It seems a particle no larger than a mm hit the solar panels on the platform. Thankfully, ESA say no major negative influence except momentary orbit problems and a slight power drain. More info here.

Sentinel 1b is up already so there is redundancy but still...

Monitoring the Oceans from Space

A free massive online course is starting late October on RS for the Marine which looks really well designed and presented. A long way from some of the courses that I have done with intermittent screen sharing and cries for help in the chat box.

Details and info on how to register here.

Slick Mapping

As we streamline the process and begin to target the right parameters for the different environmental conditions, we are starting to pick slicks out. From an assembly of three S1a slices covering most of Irish waters out to the Porcupine bank - a nice? slick appeared in the imagery from early August. The southern dark spot in this image is most likely a wind slick or waters converging - but the long, linear feature in the north is definitely something on the water surface. There is a bright spot about 2km to the east of the slick - possibly a ship after blowing its tanks. We will compare this now with all of the ancillary data we have for geology, weather, petroleum, shipping and try and classify it. Serious processing times - one setting I tested recently ran for 15 days on the server.

Update - having checked this with ancillary data - it is quite near a well. I will also check Sentinel 2a and Landsat 8 next to see if there was a cloud-free overpass coinciding with the slick for a different view.

Update 2: Nope, cloud.

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.

'Sandbox'

I saw  a video of one of these at a seminar once, but unfortunately missed the start of the talk and had no clear idea if what I saw was what I thought it was. Another video is doing the rounds of LinkedIn, twitter now - so i got a proper look. Really makes 'sandbox' take on a whole new meaning!

Resolution restrictions

Interestingly - I just saw this on DigitalGlobe's page for Worldview 3 which I had not heard about before. The spatial resolution of panchromatic imagery had been restricted to 0.31m as far as I knew. WV3 is definitely up 6 months by now?

"....six months after WorldView-3 is operational DigitalGlobe will be permitted to sell imagery at up to 25 cm panchromatic and 1.0 m multispectral GSD....."

Careers of the Future

I was asked by the Comms manager of iCRAG to take a guess on what a geo career of the future might look like and so I sent a short suggestion into SFI. It also got picked up by the Irish Times.

iFly

Just completed an excellent refresher course on drone ops with iFly technology. Amazing to think how far the practices and rules have come since we started back in 2012 with the Falcon. But i suppose when you consider how much the rules have changed since just last Christmas, that is hardly surprising!! 

Thankfully we broke for the match at 2.

SCS CPD on Remote Sensing and Flooding

Not a bad turn-out at the CPD event last night considering it is the summer - 20 attended the talk and 22 online. Thanks to Jonathon at TOPCON for the photo. Link to video of my presentation here if anyone is interested.

Edit - I got an update from the SCS CPD officer - it has since been watched by 76 people, I'm very pleased to see there was some interest.

iCRAG Summit 2016

I had a great time at the iCRAG summit in Athlone this week. The hotel, on the banks of Lough Ree was a great venue and very picturesque. The last time I was in Athlone was attending SciCom, and I raced the rain out of town at the beginning of the terrible weather that lead to flooding in early December 2015/Jan 2016 - so I was pleased to be warm, dry and see it looking so well. A great turn out, some really interesting talks on geology that even a non-geologist like me could comprehend and some really funny presenters. I find that anyone who graduated from a 'geo' course is generally extremely likeable and good company.

Looking forward to the 2017 event. 

Cloud Map

Another great example of how, "one person's noise is another person's data". As remote sensers we spend most of our time looking for cloud free images, but this is a map of clouds. Interesting that the cloudiest months for Ireland are the summer months!

Earth from space

Very interesting documentary - must keep the link for next year's students. A long one but worth the watch.

The Earth From Space

Survey Ireland - Two's Company

Survey Ireland was a great success - well done to all those involved - some excellent talks, really incredible datasets being presented and a very good turn out too. It was also interesting to hear Gerard Lawlor from the IAA mention that we have a legal definition in Ireland of just how many is a 'crowd' - more than 12 apparently!

Remote Sensing Postdoc at Maynooth University/Ireland

The GrassQ postdoc has been advertised, will be a very interesting project.

Survey Ireland 2016 - Expanding Horizons

Survey Ireland is being hosted by the SCS this year - moving to the Red Cow hotel. The theme is "Innovation and Solutions". An interesting line of talks, plus a follow-up one I am doing on Flooding.

Sentinel 1b launch

The second of the Sentinel SAR satellites is going up this Friday. Sentinel 1b's introduction means that instead of having to wait approx 12 days between each overpass we should only have to wait about 5 or 6 days? They have also piggybacked a number of smaller cubesats on the launch vehicle to get maximum bang for their buck.. Speaking of Sentinel - here is a great image that I came across last week of a Sentinel 1a multi-temporal SAR colour composite of land coverage across the island created by ESA.

Good luck Sentinel 1b.

Flood Mapping

The article that I mentioned that I was collaborating on for flood mapping has been published in the Surveyors Journal. We even got the cover image spot - although it is odd - the theme of this issue was 'Flood Mapping' - and although there are 23 references to floods in the document all of them are in our article..

Citations and Profile

I must admit that it does give me a chuckle to think that if something was published along the lines of,

"...and the most recent findings of Cahalane et. al are absolute rubbish - they should be struck off the University's books and whipped by a professional committee...",

it would count as a citation and could possibly increase my h-index.

Additionally - there was a relatively well publicised case of thesis data falsification earlier in the year - I had a look at the person in questions Researchgate page - as did many others..they were hot stuff for a few days and their RG score went up correspondingly!

Australian Data Hub

A few interesting points from the recent ESA announcement of their collaboration in the formation of a DataHub for Copernicus imagery.

ESA Sentinel 2 image of Lake Amadeus in Australia...

Excluding the obvious good news of more people using ESA data, two points leap out at me:

** The regional data hub will also provide a high-performance environment in which all the data can be analysed and applied at full scale to big regional challenges like the blue economy, sustainable livelihoods and climate change adaptation

I wonder what the high performance hub entails? A cloud-based processing environment? You certainly need a beefy machine to process Sentinel data and I know that from personal experience of the Irish coastline - Australia would really be something else.

** Under the arrangement, GA will also act as a coordinating point for European partners to obtain access to Australian in-situ data, which is made available through the efforts of many Australian government agencies, research partnerships and universities.

That is very useful. One of the great things about EO data is that in theory an Irish company could compete against an Australian project for a project in Australia. The data is there and there are no restrictions for having to be on-site, unless you need ground control or other in-situ datasets for validation/calibration. This will help to a certain extent.

Looking forward to hearing more.

Worlds Oldest Map?

I saw this map mentioned at the OSi launch last week - found in a cave in Spain and approximately 14,000 years old. Shame it has been there all that time and this is the highest res, annotated copy that I could find online!! Still - a very interesting find.

OSi GI Research and Development Initiatives.

Ordnance Survey Ireland launched their new R&D initiatives yesterday - a very welcome addition to the competitive funding pool for Ireland. Some of the info needs clarifying but it looks like

• 2 x 2 year x €50k Postdoc funding.
• 5 x €5k MSc prize

are up for grabs. The priority areas all seem to have a satellite/ remote sensing element to them as well so I may have to look and also get the students to submit their portfolios for the MSc prize.

Their own work really looks good too - linked data, Prime 2 - well done OSi! Full info and launch is scheduled for the 29th of April so hopefully more info available then.

GSI Shortcalls

The GSi Shortcall results and press release are out. 

We were successful in our application and will be designing a short study for developing a rapid, low-cost bathymetric survey methodology using multiresolution imagery. Alot of questions arose from the previous satellite bathymetry study - particularly in relation to the different spatial, spectral and temporal resolutions and their influence on accuracy. The shortcalls will help us to continue the work on it.

 

Real time satellite data?

Interesting article here, 13 minutes to process Sentinel 1a data from time of image capture? Must find out more about this EDRS SpaceDataHighway...

Maps of the Year

I came across some great maps here, on MapsMania - be prepared to lose a few hours...i ordered myself a print of the Roads to Rome one for the wall.

100 Posts

Do I get a cheque from the president? Will I make it to 1000? Anyway I am still struggling on, haven't given up blogging yet and always have a few draft posts in reserve :)

Actually my 'reserves' are getting out of hand - I need to post more.

COST Action Workshop - Feb 2016

Just back from a very interesting three day workshop in Dubrovnik. I missed last years COST action MC meet as I had lectures so I had to make this one, despite it being 3 flights each way! I also had to stay a day late and travel a day early as off-season Dubrovnik is not an easy place to get to. Some good talks though and we got a great overview of the recently approved Copernicus Earth Explorer mission, FLEX from the person who lead the proposal - Jose Moreno. Good to see some familiar faces from Milan and Poland.

Trade Journals V Peer Reviewed Articles

I have been asked to write articles recently for two non-peer reviewed publications, Hydro International and the Surveyors Journal. One of the articles is on EO and flood mapping and the other is on satellite bathymetry. It is a very different writing style to what I have been doing over the last 7 years with prepping conference papers, journal papers and a thesis.. Instead of max detail, leave no stone unturned, the opposite is the case and things have to be made more reader-friendly for the wider audience.

I sent off my drafts recently, will be interesting to see whether they take a hatchet to it or how much gets through.

Sentinel 3a getting ready!

Here is the ESA blog charting the last days to the launch (16th Feb). You should also be able to watch the launch live. Details on the Satellite here. I really liked how they choose the rocket logos - apparently it is a tradition to associate each Rocket launch with a constellation made of a number of ‘bright’ stars equal to the number of the launch. This is 25 - so they chose the Libra constellation.