Today we are updating stakeholders on the work of the National landcover habitat mapping working group.
We’re hosting a copy of the draft map for Kerry so people can see the potential
Month: May 2017
How satellites die
We were having a chat about data sources new and old, and EO-1 was mentioned. E0_1 has been a very long lived satellite testing hyper-spectral observations (with a remarkably good Irish coverage, especially Munster) but has recently been decommissioned.
We wondered how a satellite thats been orbiting for so much longer than intended is handle at the end of its life (boosted into a higher orbit? Accelerated De-orbited ? Managed de-orbit?)
Anyway we searched around and came up with the end of life program. And this little nugget from the document caught my eye:
“7.0 Assessment of Spacecraft Reentry Hazards
To access the risk of human casualty from surviving debris, the total debris casualty area, Da, has been calculated to be 5.9 m2 and the total average population density Pd, for the EO-1 orbit inclination of 98.2° and re-entry year of 2043, is determined to be 12.838 per square km based on information provided by the NASA Orbital Debris Program Office at JSC. In accordance with the NASA-STD 8719.14, the resulting risk of human casualty from surviving debris is calculated to be 0.0000757 (0.757:10,000) which is within the requirement of less than 0.0001 (1:10,000)”
I wonder how a 10,000 to one chance of injury was set as an acceptable threshold
New Teagasc PhD opporutniy in Remote Sensing
A Teagasc Walsh Fellowship is available, deadline for applications is June 30th.
The 4 year structured PhD Fellowship is a joint research project between the Department of AgrifoodBusiness and Spatial Analysis, REDP, Teagasc (Ashtown), Maynooth University Department of Geography, Maynooth University, and the Department of Geography, University College Dublin. The student will be co-located between Teagasc Ashtown, Dublin and Maynooth University and will be registered at Maynooth University. The student will be working under the supervision of Rowan Fealy (MU) and Stuart Green (Teagasc).
The proposed research will establish a methodology for utilising rainfall radar, in combination with MetÉireann’s precipitation gauge network, to develop high spatio-temporal resolution, near real-time rainfall estimates for Ireland. An analysis of the rainfall radar will also be undertaken with available satellite data (eg. METEOSAT; Sentinel 1a/b). The results will provide a robust basis for developing real time,
local rainfall estimates that coupled with the Teagasc Nutrient Management Planning decision support system (NMP Online) can inform timing of fertiliser applications.
Full details here Walsh Fellowship PhD Advert Rainfall Radar May2017 (3)
Detecting Forest Fires with satellite
Whilst gorse and forest fires rage across the country, causing particular destruction in Galway, its might be interesting to see these events in a global context.
NASA runs a “real time” forest fire detection service, using thermal anomaly mapping from MODIS and VIIRS satellites. A screen grab from today show the global distribution of fires in the last 24hrs (red dots):
You can access the FIRMS service here
Competion to find new uses for satellite data in Agriculture
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Remote Sensing projects in New EPA funding call
The latest round of EPA Ireland research funding calls have just been announced.
http://www.epa.ie/researchandeducation/research/epafunding/researchcall2017/
And there are two explicitly remote sensing calls under the water section:
| Water 2017 Call – Project 4 | Potential for the use of drones for the purposes of open lake water sampling | €150,000 |
| Water 2017 Call – Project 5 | Remote sensing of surface waters in Ireland | €250,000 |
I’d say there would also be RS elements to water projects 2 and 7.
Nothing obvious jumps out from the other two pillars- maybe a role for RS in the Climate call landuse project
Remote sensing trees in Dublin
Nice new report measuring total tree canopy cover in dublin using remote sensing:
