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