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.