Tuesday 19 April 2016

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.

Monday 11 April 2016

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..


Wednesday 6 April 2016

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!

Tuesday 5 April 2016

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.

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.