2019 - A year in review

2019 was another good year.

Work on the OSi project coming to a successful conclusion, 3 journal papers published (one with Remote Sensing of Environment), 2 surveyors journal articles published, 2 EO sessions at EUGEO, a SFI Discover award, through to last stages of SFI Frontiers, managed to get an ERC proposal submitted, co-developing the new INFOMAR module, collaborated on national space strategy - and sponsorship of a eBee drone from KOREC!

Think that's it - time to enjoy the holiday.

SFI Discover - Space, Surveyors and Students: STEM and Sustainable Development Goals (5*S)

Very pleased to hear that our SFI Discover proposal was successful - Space, Surveyors and Students: STEM and Sustainable Development Goals (5*S)

5*S builds on two existing national school-based programmes to target a national audience. A collaboration between Esri Ireland’s award-winning, ‘ArcGIS for Schools’ programme and the Society of Chartered Surveyors ‘Day in the Life’ recruitment programme offers the opportunity to combine a national network of volunteers with an existing data and training infrastructure  in Irish primary and post-primary schools. Added to that 5*S was awarded funding for a software developer to work on AR and bring Copernicus into the schools.

Project partners are Maynooth Geog, Maynooth Dept Education, TU Dublin, Esri Ireland, Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland and Ordnance Survey Ireland - collaborating with ESERO/SFI.

We'll have more info in 2020 and announce it properly but here's the Silicon Republic article

New Paper: Spatially Optimised

Glimpse getting another outing with a recent LiDAR/point cloud paper in the Journal of Spatial Science with a few NCG alumni. Dr. Pankaj Kumar (now in Uni of South Australia) lead author.

Spatially optimised retrieval of 3D point cloud data from a geospatial 

database for road median extraction

Download Link

"The Drone" - A Post for Halloween....

Its not often I have a geo-related 'Halloween' blogpost - but I came across this movie on Sky movies recently and could not believe my eyes...someone seems to have cast a standard DJI Drone as 'the murderer' in a recent movie. It has everything to shock and horrify a licensed drone pilot - unsafe flying practices, dangerous maneuvers in shared airspace, flying indoors, GDPR violations - it even looks like it weaponises poor battery charging procedures. The thing that will push me over the edge is if they don't back up their data at the end...horrific.

ICESAT 2 and Bathymetry

IceSAT 2 was in the news recently - people have been using it to map the seabed/water depths. This is good news - the availability of recently captured calibration datasets (no matter how sparse) is a major impediment to roll-out of satellite derived bathymetry, as the seabed changes so much over time in places and the calibration data should ideally be captured close to the time the image was captured at. Laser wavelength is in the green portion of the spectrum - so good for penetrating water - wonder where they get the surface from? Weaker returns maybe? Tide gauge nearby?

I had a look to see what sort of coverage we had for coastal regions in Ireland and was directed to the excellent openaltimetry website. Looks like we have one scanline running through Tralee bay, another through Dublin bay - both sites we have published papers for but used older calibration data.

If you look closely in the image above - you can see there are points to the left and right of the green scanline - I dont know enough about the system yet to know is the profile spacing actually less (p.s. less is better) than that image suggests, or is that something to do with image footprint (unlikely as it is only 17m according to the website). You can use openaltimetry.org to have a quick look at profiles anywhere in Ireland - wonder would it have picked up the change over the National Ploughing Championships...

Anyway - looking forward to exploring this data in more detail.


Update: Here's my answer - 6 beams organised in 3 pairs, with a weak/strong combination. Probably also answers the water surface question too..

EARSC Market Report

The annual EARSC report is out, summarizing the European Space Industry and Market in 2019. Always an interesting read - I was please to see Ireland moving up the '"Number of Companies" ranking, ahead of number of larger countries, so a great sign that things are moving in the right direction. We will see how the recent launch of the national space strategy effects this.

It certainly should effect it positively, as only yesterday Minister Halligan was in the news announcing some success stories in Irish industry and also a new €500,000 fund to help private industry collaborate with public bodies on space based projects. Very interesting to see ESA will also be partnered with Maynooth University in organizing this fund, so more good news there.

I can certainly see plenty of opportunities for collaborations and know multiple public bodies looking for expertise, the problem is finding the right partners in private industry.

ERC - again....

Academia is a funny old fish - three years ago I was tapping away at the weekend on an ERC project proposal, only to be surprised by an early arrival. Three years later at that 'early arrivals' 3rd birthday party I'm busy revising that proposal for resubmission. Lots changed in those three years, mostly my knowledge of Thomas the Tank Engine and Dinosaurs.

Update: ok - submitted. Now to deal with the massive backlog that has accumulated!

Our new eBee RTK - a donation from KOREC

We had Helen Gilmartin from Korec onsite earlier in the week. Immediately after greeting the new cohort for the MSc in GIS/Remote Sensing we went outside to use the lovely autumn colours (and the new MSc cohort) as a backdrop for the photo of a drone handover. Korec very generously donated a fixed wing RTK drone - the eBEee RTK to the department and this hardware going to be really important for lectures and research in the coming years. 

The students...

And the lovely colours...

Sentinel in the news again

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.

Paper Published: Remote Sensing of Environment

The GSI shortcall in 2015 gave us the opportunity to look at ways of applying bathymetric derivation algorithms to high resolution imagery. We looked at RapidEye (5m), Pleiades (2m), light aircraft and drones (sub-decimetre). The project focussed primarily on the airborne and drones (report available here)  but gave us valuable insights on what we needed to take the algorithms and begin to adapt them for satellite data provided through ESA TPM license. We were then able to advance the work begun with the Dublin bay bathymetry paper  and look at applying spatial and non-spatial models to improve accuracy of satellite derived bathymetry (spoiler - helps as depth increases). This was a multi partner project - I've been working on it over the 4 years and includes NCG, Rothamstead Research,Geological Survey and industry. Great to see it finally published in such a good journal.

Available to download via open access here

Rohingya Crisis and EO

I see the Rohingya are back in the news again, after almost all of them turned down an offer of repatriation - satellite imagery is helping monitor the expansion of refugee camps in Bangladesh and other countries where they ended up, plus the razing of their old villages. Most interesting/horrifying was to see that all the work that has gone ahead on Bashan Char (not Thengar Char as originally reported - some confusion on what soggy mud island we were looking at confused everyone). Ive posted about this before on twitter, but look at the gif below from thenewhumanitatiarn.org to see it yourself.

And if you want to see just how precarious living on this island is - look at this map and this map produced by ESA showing how often parts of the island are under water. And that is without rising sea levels..

The Rohignya will be housed right at the edge of that red line, which if you notice in the second image from ESA is only 'land surface' about 81% of the time. That's a lot of flooding.

Fake News Makes it Way to EO

The director of the Brazilian National Space Research Institute (INPE) has been sacked for presenting results from satellite imagery showing severe deforestation under the current Government, and then arguing their accuracy following official criticism. The data was just added to a dashboard on a government website - no big splash was made of the news, but still it caught the government's attention. The President and ministers said it was all 'lies' and that INPE was in the pocket of a 'foreign not for profit group'. The environment minister is claiming many of those spots have been showing as deforestation for years in 'their data' - but has not released the data nor the methodology to refute the INPE claims.

BIM From Space - Part 2

BIM From a Distance - Part 2 is out now in the Summer edition of the Surveyors Journal - what more could you want on the hottest day of the summer so far!? Take a look now to find out how the SCSI port mapping study story ends - spoiler alert - the satellite did it.

God, i'd love an ice-pop.

National Space Strategy Published

The National Space Strategy Consultation of July 2018 got some useful info and feedback - as part of the SCSI RS & EO working group we provided feedback from the mapping/built environment/property sectors - and the follow up meeting in August was an interesting experience with lots of stakeholders gathered to voice their opinions. The culmination of all this work resulted in the launch yesterday by Minister Halligan of the first National Space Strategy for Ireland 2019 - 2025. Plenty of food for thought and the section on upskilling in particular caught my eye following a recent SFI Discovery submission.

Drone Industry Day - Maynooth University

Thanks to Tim and the team for a very interesting day of talks on North Campus. Beginning with an update on the rapidly approaching European Drone Regs - and followed by speakers discussing things ranging from Manna (the best name ever for a drone food delivery company) to ways to stop wifi, radio or GPS piloted rogue drones - i got plenty of food for thought. One of the tools shown on the video was a giant electromagnetic gun that can fry a drones circuit-board from quite a distance.. Advances in UTM are one to watch and one of the early speakers told us that the first apartment (i can't remember if its an apartment or a block of apartments) built in London with its own drone delivery pad is opening tomorrow. The times they are a-changing...

New Drones @ Department of Geography

Took delivery of two drones this morning.

One is a Parrott Bluegrass - a rugged, out of the box rotary drone with a forward facing oblique RGB camera and a nadir looking Parrott Sequioa. A very nice piece of kit, eliminates many of the issues I spoke about before with bespoke integration mounts for sensors on the DJI series.

The other is a  fixed wing - covers a much wider area and has RGB capability via a canon camera.

Looking forward to testing these two out - need to renew my SOP and license and then up, up and away.....

EUGEO - CIG2019

A big congrats to the team at NUIG for hosting such a great event - some really interesting talks over the 4 days and some nice weather for a trip to Galway. The EO session went well, Daithí and I had some really interesting speakers in a dual session - everything from satellite SAR to Drone photogrammetry.

That's it for 2019 - commiserations to Cian and team at Trinity who are hosting it next year.

Smart Farming

Liadh Kelly and Peter Mooney from Dept of CS are organising a smart farming event in mid June (12th) - two talks in particular might be of interest to Geo's/RSers - I'm giving some demos on Copernicus and satellite applications, Aidan from NCG is giving a demo of drones and what they can do. Looks like it will be an interesting day and a good line up of speakers. Aimed at techie and non-tecchie/policy makers alike - so spread the word.

My role is also tied in with SCSI - who released the annual Land Review with Teagasc last week, outreach like this and training is one of the goals of the Earth Observation and RS working group.

Stronger Standards, Stronger Profession

Survey Ireland was a success again - lots of the usual faces and ran smoothly and to plan in Dunboyne (with the usual ice cream treat).

Very wide range of speakers - starting with Lorraine McNerney and the UN GGIM Sustainable Development Goals and followed closely by James Kavanagh and the RICS standards work. I was particularly interested in a doc he mentioned on promoting security of tenure in developing countries. As well as that we had a talk on mental wellbeing - an important topic for such a busy profession and even had a talk on projections finishing up as a slide on snakes and ladders. The Discovery Programme did the usual visual feast for the yes on their range of projects over the years - Skellig Michael in particular.

The age-old riddle remains unanswered - how to get students to attend these events. There were free tickets this year and I still only saw one student!

Well done to Niamh for arranging the excellent lineup and to Edel, Patrick and team for keeping things running so smoothly.

Survey Ireland 2019

Conference season is rapidly approaching - starting with Survey Ireland 2019 on the 8th May in Dunboyne Castle. Despite promising myself that I would not present again on space tech this year (it's been four years in a row, this will be the 5th....), I was 'volunteered' at one of the committee meetings. Serves me right for missing it I suppose. The talk will be on Remote sensing Data, what is available and it’s suitability for different applications.

Anyway - looking forward to the event and to seeing some familiar faces. 

Current schedule here.

EUGEO and CIG2019

We had such a good response this year that we have had to organise a dual EO session for the joint CIG/EUGEO this year in Galway. Sessions 2.3.7 and 2.4.7 - should be a great selection of talks. Thanks to all who applied and to co-convenor Daithí for all the hard work in compiling the submissions.

Conference programme available at this link

BIM From a Distance

Part 1 of our article on 'BIM from a Distance' has just been published in the Surveyors Journal. This was a SCSI/ESA funded study using high resolution passive and active satellites to monitor construction in Dublin port. Part 1 introduces the problem, proposed methodology etc - Part 2 will cover the results.

This was a very interesting study to be part of - basically proving to me that high resolution satellites can measure the dimensions of structures achieving relative accuracies of +/- 0.5m. This means that the process is not entirely dissimilar from traditional methods band even more importantly is repeatable and exportable for any site worldwide. We presented these results in CIG2018 in Maynooth and again in Survey Ireland 2018 in Dunboyne.

Plane Spotters V Drone Renegades

I deleted a few awful drone puns as potential headers for this post - will be hard to get through the rest of it without making one but I am determined to do it. 

There was an interesting initiative announced in the Journal.ie  at the weekend. Warning posters have been placed all around the boundary of Dublin Airport with information on how airplane enthusiasts/spotters can report suspicious drone usage. It might be stereotyping to characterise them as such, but considering airplane spotters are probably fans of rules, regulations and order; are operating in the problem zone; have binoculars and are taking pictures constantly - they are good allies to have in the fight against drone renegades like those who closed down Gatwick (and Dublin to a lesser extent) a few months back.

Pic courtesy of thejournal.ie

 The main complaints in the comments section were about why the notices are 'as gaeilge'. My word of the day is Ladrainn - which means drone, apparently.

USGS considering move towards charging for Landsat imagery again

I read about this recently but it popped up again on my twitter feed this morning - the USGS (of Landsat fame) are considering reinstating charges for Landsat imagery. For those of you more familiar with the Copernicus (ESA) era of earth observation satellites, NASA/USGS were the founders of the free earth observation data model. Three or four years after I finished undergrad they made all the data from Landsat 5 and 7 available to users - free of charge. Suddenly this treasure-trove of free, 30m pixel size multispectral data (updated every 12 days or so) appeared and the number of users (myself included) skyrocketed. See the graph below showing number of publications using Landsat imagery after the 2008 switch in policy - that's almost exponential growth, if you are looking for an indicator to show a policy works then that what more could you ask.

So, "More users?" I hear you say, "So what - USGS/NASA/USA are losing out financially right?" Right in a way - but very wrong in another - all of the users are people using Landsat data to improve crop health, increase forestry yields, manage the ocean and coastal resources, mitigate natural disasters or private sector looking to sell services, develop apps, start companies - this all returns massive rewards to the national accounts, not just one publicly funded body. They definitely aren't all in the US - but a paper that is written by authors in India for example and publishes a useful case study - can that not help a US company?

Spatial data provides massive value to any economy - just look at the value that was placed on geospatial data in Ireland a few years back by an ESRI/OSi study. Even as a small nation the direct value was measured at around €120m and additional benefits through time savings etc of around €279million.

So I don't know where this decision is coming from - although I can guess...and considering the fact Copernicus is here now with more, better satellites - what are they hoping to happen? Is Landsat 9 going to be that much of a game changer? Off the top of my head the only things Landsat 8 has that the Sentinels don't is a high resolution coastal blue band and a high resolution thermal. So they will charge for the data, when it is in less demand?

The New Normal

Copernicus are doing a series of posts on Twitter entitled 'the new normal?'. Images of wildfires in the middle of winter - often only a few kilometres from snow. These images were on the Dublin Fire Brigade twitter page at the weekend of the fires in the Dublin mountains. One day later the whole county was covered in snow. The whole country is still way behind on groundwater levels, see Teagasc's latest map of the month for satellite derived measurements of soil moisture. Measured via MODIS at 1km spatial resolution, you can see how bad 2018 was for crops.

SWIR Image from Sentinel 2 - Copernicus Imagery

Image taken out window of plane leaving Dublin Airport - Dublin Fire Brigade Twitter

 It is the same all over Europe at present - Croatia, Romania, Spain, Bosnia-Herzegovina - have a look at the Copernicus Twitter Page

#Technologyweek on Twitter

Make sure to take a look at some of the twitter posts in the sidebar - I'm giving a few updates for #Technologyweek for #YearofGeography.

Story Telling From Space

I came across an excellent intro on satellite imagery on twitter during the week -  but what really caught my attention was some of the supports dedicated to journalists, like 'Satellite Journalism - the big picture' - a paper showcasing loads of examples of EU data used in investigations around the world, this has so many examples from a quick skim I gave it this morning that it is a must read.

Image from 'Satellite Journalism - the Big picture'

Another interesting resource - Earth Rise Media is an EO company that aims to help journalists with 'story telling from space'. tons of good stuff in these different links - need time to go through it properly and I want to have a proper read of the satellite journalism one.

Free (LiDAR) Datsets

I came across a great resource recently and have directed the MSc GIS/RS students to it for their next assignment. OpenTopography is a huge repository of freely available topographic data (raster and vector) but of particular interest to the GIS/RS students is the point cloud data that they are using for their LiDAR assignment. 

I counted 271 aerial LiDAR datasets, 8 terrestrial laser scanner datasets and 4 photogrammetrically-derived point clouds. I was impressed not only by the volume but also the variety, with point clouds of everything ranging from volcanoes to landslides to urban centres. It is a simple drag and drop selection and download interface and you don't even need to register for the smaller files. It will also provide partial processing for you in the download options! Data is largely concentrated in USA but I spotted data for New Zealand, Spain and other locations.

My only complaint so far is that when you are selecting data for one of the change detection studies (very helpfully flagged as such in the listing) you do not know where in the test site the change occurred - but the dataset is too large to download it all and find out, so you are kind of snookered! Note: I googled for a nice image to show snookered but there was none, what's up with that?

GIS in Schools

Some big news for geography (and geo in general) just before Christmas. ESRI - the largest supplier of GIS software in the world (and founded by the man with the excellent name - Jack Dangermond) has recently announced nearly half a billion euro worth of GIS and mapping software for primary and secondary schools around the country. Almost a million students, in 4,000 schools will all have free access to AGOL. This all feeds into the digital strategy action plan - launched in June by Minister Bruton and will be a huge benefit to students. There was one map on the wall of the geography class in my school - that was it.

Its a shame with this type of investment going into the schools that Geography is not still a compulsory subject at junior level.

Congrats to all involved in the initiative - I have heard a few familiar names come up in conversation.

Worldview 4- Gyroscope Failure

Looks like it may be curtains for the satellite providing the highest image resolution currently available on the market. At 0.31m (max spatial resolution permissible for commercial sale under US law - no idea what it was technically capable of) World view 4's panchromatic band was the crispest image you could get from space to the best of my knowledge. I have never used any WV4 data - but having used the Pleiades 0.5m panchromatic images - you could see road markings, cars, the whole area in incredible detail so can only imagine how good it was almost x2 better. 

Space.com and others reported WV4 has experience a gyroscope malfunction - which will stop it from pointing properly. These VHR (very high resolution) satellites were critically dependant on pointing capabilities, as with the longer FOV required to enable a hi-res image capture, the image footprint was reduced correspondingly. Targets of opportunity and localized areas in high detail were their specialty.

Interesting figures given on return of investment for WV4 - net book value is €155 million (i assume that means to build and launch - possibly maintain and process data), but the returns were approximately €85m in 2018 alone. Having launched in Nov 2016 - had it paid for itself yet? Possibly.

Digital Globe plan to continue efforts to restore it - but they expect those efforts to be unsuccessful.

2018 - A year in review

A bit late doing this update - but another interesting one in 2018..

• One blizzard
• One heat wave
• One drought
• One MSc accredited
• One paper
• 2 jobs
• 10 modules
• 3 conferences

Roll on 2019!