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MDA To Provide Radar Information In Support Of Maritime Safety To The U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency

(23 September 2011) MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates Ltd., a provider of essential information solutions, announced today that it has signed a multi-million dollar sole source delivery order under its Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity contract with the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

MDA will provide radar information to be used in creating ice charts and for maritime surveillance to improve the safety of maritime navigation.

MDA Receives Amendments To Design Phase Of Canada’s RADARSAT Constellation Mission

(23 September 2011) MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates Ltd., a provider of essential information solutions, announced today that it has received two contract amendments from the Canadian Space Agency totaling CA$ 9.18 million, for the Design Phase of the RADARSAT Constellation Mission.

The amendments continue the long lead procurement of parts and equipment needed for the Build Phase.

MDA Continues To Provide Critical Information To Monitor Surface Deformation In Mines

(22 September 2011) MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates Ltd., a provider of essential information solutions, announced today that it has signed contracts in excess of CA$990,000 with Luossavaara-Kiirunavaara AB (LKAB) and a leading potash producer to provide critical information from RADARSAT-2 for monitoring surface deformation at and in the vicinity of their mines.

The contract with LKAB extends an existing agreement for a further three years.

MDA will apply advanced RADARSAT-2 technology to detect subtle surface changes, weather independent, over a broad area. Early detection of changes, such as subsidence, allows remedial actions to happen before problems escalate and impact the environmental safety or production activities of the mine. MDA will also provide analytical reports that compare the historical to the current situation. These reports are valuable support documents required by regulatory organizations.

About MDA

MDA provides advanced information solutions that capture and process vast amounts of data, produce essential information, and improve the decision making and operational performance of business and government organizations worldwide.

Focused on markets and customers with strong repeat business potential, MDA delivers a broad spectrum of information solutions, ranging from complex operational systems, to tailored information services, to electronic information products.

(source: MDA)

Satellites are helping to forecast the location of urban areas most affected during heat waves, helping planners to design cooler, more comfortable cities.

The temperature in densely urbanised areas can be several degrees higher than in nearby rural areas – a phenomenon known as the ‘urban heat island’ effect.

These ‘heat islands’ are particularly noticeable at night. During the day, cities accumulate solar radiation and release the energy after the Sun sets.

The negative effects of this increase in urban temperatures are multiple: health problems, higher energy demand, air pollution and water shortages.

At their final review held at ESA’s ESRIN site Frascati, Italy, the Urban Heat Islands and Urban Thermography team presented its findings on how remote sensing allows the continuous monitoring of thermal radiation emitted by urban surfaces.
Monitoring thermal radiation can help city planners to design more ‘liveable’ cities, assist civil protection authorities in taking adequate measures during heat waves and create maps of energy efficiency.
The project analysed trends in heat distribution over 10 European cities – Athens, Bari, Brussels, Budapest, Lisbon, London, Madrid, Paris, Seville and Thessaloniki – over the last 10 years, using multiple sensors.
Satellite sensors played a large role in collecting data, providing thermal-infrared measurements that scientists then used to improve urban climate and weather prediction models that can forecast heat waves. Two airborne campaigns and multiple ground sensors also contributed.

Forecast for Thessaloniki
In mid-August 2010, two strong heat islands were correctly forecast in Thessaloniki, Greece a day in advance. These heat islands lead to elevated temperatures and reduce thermal comfort.

At night, the most vulnerable areas of city retained high temperatures, above 31°C.

According to the forecast, there was a small area within the urban centre where both temperature and risk were expected to be low – corresponding to an open space with abundant vegetation cover.

Parks cool areas of Madrid
Thermal radiation maps of Madrid compared to soil surface maps showed that the night air temperature in parks or areas of vegetation is significantly cooler than other areas. This demonstrates the important role that green areas play in the overall thermal radiation and circulation of urban areas.

The new urban climate models show a muggy outlook for the future. During the summer of 2003, large portions of Europe were struck by a major heat wave. Paris was affected severely as the urban heat island effect prevented the city from cooling during the night, leading to thousands of heat-related deaths.

Modelling results suggest that, in the future, heat waves of this intensity and duration might occur every 3–4 years.

Source

(23 September 2011) ESA’s Envisat observation satellite yesterday completed its 50 000th circuit of Earth – travelling 2.25 billion km since its launch nearly a decade ago.

Envisat orbits our planet every 100 minutes, speeding along at more than seven kilometres per second.

Launched on 28 February 2002, the lorry-sized Envisat is the largest Earth observation satellite ever built.

It is also the world’s most complex environmental satellite, with ten different instruments studying Earth’s land, oceans and atmosphere.

They include the Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer, which captures images of ocean colour and land cover, like the above scene of New Zealand.

The Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar can be used day or night because it can see through clouds and darkness. This is particularly useful over polar regions, which are prone to long periods of bad weather and extended darkness.

Trace gases in the troposphere and stratosphere are measured globally by the Sciamachy imaging spectrometer, yielding maps of air pollution such as carbon dioxide, methane and nitrogen dioxide.

Nitrogen dioxide – a mainly man-made gas – can cause lung damage and respiratory problems.

It also plays an important role in atmospheric chemistry because it leads to the production of ozone in the troposphere, the lowest part of the atmosphere.

Envisat’s Michelson Interferometer for Passive Atmospheric Sounding monitors gases and pollutants. As one of three atmospheric instruments, it can map the levels of more than 20 trace gases, including ozone, as well as the pollutants that attack ozone.

The sensor is particularly useful for tracking the ozone hole over the Antarctic.

Other Envisat instruments include the Radar Altimeter, which measures surface height to an accuracy of a few centimetres, and the Advanced Along-Track Scanning Radiometer, which records global ground and sea-surface temperatures.

(source: ESA)

(19 september 2011) Astrium Services has signed a three-year contract with the European Space Agency (ESA) for the delivery of satellite images under the terms of the European GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment & Security) programme.

This contract, initially worth 17 million Euro, is being funded by the European Commission.

The contract covers the provision of optical data from the SPOT 4/5 and FORMOSAT-2 satellites and radar images from the TerraSAR-X and TanDEM-X satellites, plus additional data from the Pleiades constellation and the SPOT 6/7 satellites. This data will help improve the quality of the geo-information services with which the European governments aim to implement their environmental and crisis-management policies. The data and services will be available to all public users on a European, national and regional level.

According to Patrick Le Roch, Head of GEO-Information at Astrium Services, “This contract adds to the importance of Astrium’s place in the GMES programme. As well as confirming our role as suppliers of satellite-based data, it will also enable us to develop and enhance the services we provide to civil emergency response groups (SAFER) and environmental protection agencies (GEOLAND) in Europe. SAFER has been activated more than a hundred times in the past two years, and GEOLAND has helped to improve environmental protection in Europe by providing more accurate land-usage data.”

Astrium Services is recognized as one of the leaders in the geo-information market, not least thanks to the skills and resources of its now fully integrated, former subsidiaries Spot Image and Infoterra. The company provides decision-makers with multiservice solutions permitting them to increase security, protect the environment, or improve their management of natural resources. It enjoys exclusive access to data from the SPOT and TerraSAR-X satellites, coupled with a complete range of space-based data sources and airborne acquisition capability enabling it to offer an unrivalled portfolio of Earth observation services and products. This portfolio covers the entire geo-information supply chain, from the generation of images to their exploitation by the end user.

By making use of the synergies and expertise of Astrium Services, GEO-Information is also capable of developing competitive, innovative solutions based on the combination and integration of Earth observation, navigation and telecommunication applications.

About GMES

The GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment & Security) programme was created by the European Commission with the support of the European Space Agency (ESA). It aims to supply geo-information products and services based on the use of images from space that will help European institutions and public authorities to fulfil their mission of safeguarding the civil population, managing risks, and protecting the environment.

About Astrium

Astrium is the number one company in Europe for space technologies and a wholly owned subsidiary of EADS, dedicated to providing civil and defence space systems and services.

In 2010, Astrium had a turnover of €5 billion and more than 15,000 employees worldwide, mainly in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Spain and the Netherlands. Its three main areas of activity are Astrium Space Transportation for launchers and orbital infrastructure, Astrium Satellites for spacecraft and ground segment, and Astrium Services for comprehensive end-to-end solutions covering secure and commercial satcoms and networks, high security satellite communications equipment, bespoke geo-information and navigation services worldwide.

EADS is a global leader in aerospace, defence and related services. In 2010, the Group – comprising Airbus, Astrium, Cassidian and Eurocopter – generated revenues of € 45.8 billion and employed a workforce of nearly 122,000.

(source: Astrium)

The European Environment Agency is responsible for developing, implementing and evaluating environmental policy for 32 member countries in the European Union. As part of their mandate, they look closely at adapting environmental governance due to our rapidly changing world. V1 editor Matt Ball spoke with Jacqueline McGlade, executive director of this agency, at the recent Esri International User Conference where she gave a keynote about her agency’s lead role on sensors and systems, and about the growing need to mitigate impacts on the environment.

V1: Is the open data movement and urge for transparency that is sweeping across government making its way into the environmental monitoring community?

McGlade: In the last few years, we’ve really been pushing countries to come online voluntarily with information that isn’t part of their regulatory requirement, but that citizens really want to know about. Air quality is a classic one, where countries don’t have to report all the time on air quality, but they are doing it, and for cities in particular.

This idea that you do yourself less harm by reporting everything to the citizen is gradually building up. In other words, it’s better to be open and transparent about what’s really happening, than to hide it away or to create information aggregates and to smooth out all the anomalies.

V1: Often we hear that one of the barriers to data sharing is because those holding the data don’t want to expose the poor quality of their data. Is there still a fear about how the data is utilised?

McGlade: People are very aware of environmental conditions. There are things that no matter how well you try, you cannot overcome. Air quality is one of those. The Netherlands, for example, is often struggling to meet the air quality requirements, but it’s not for want of trying, it’s because of the wind-borne natural circulation of air across the troposphere that brings pollutants from the East (from Central Asia and from China). It just so happens that it gets dumped in that part of Europe.

You can have the cleanest and best policies on the ground, but if you get delivered a whole extra load of pollutants that is transported a long way from somewhere else, then it’s very difficult to cope with. You try to understand what the burden is, and what you have to assimilate, and you have to react to it. It’s not that it’s bad data, it’s telling you important things about the exposure issues related to your population. You might have to have other actions, such as urging people to stay indoors.

I think the preemptive and reactive response is much more relevant today than in the past. It is important to see all that the data shows, because otherwise you’re not credible.

V1: You spoke a good deal about mankind’s role in global change in your keynote address. Your agency’s role is very much in the impact detection business, and it continually strikes me how little understanding we have about our long-term impacts.

McGlade: I think that another role that we play, and it’s linked very much to our mission, centers around sustainability. We develop and deliver information that enables government and citizens to have a strategy that is sustainable. We are strong advocates of the precautionary principle, and have often invoked this principle, maybe sometimes against the wishes of industry and governments, but unfortunately in most cases we have proven to be right over time. The power of the precautionary principle is that it makes people think.

There is a huge responsibility for an agency like the one that I run, where you have people trusting you, and they trust us because we are very transparent, because we challenge countries, and we try as best as we can to validate data. We do it on the basis of no surprises. If we find fault with data and reports, we always go back and ask for these to be rechecked and verified.

The public looks to us, as does the legislature, to really put together the evidence that will help make good policy in the future and also to tell them which policies are not working. Some policies become almost irrelevant, and become superseded by other policy that is happening such as with transport, agriculture and climate change.

We have a lookout role looking at global trends, we do a lot of scenario and futures work, and we do this preemptive work to have precaution. We tend to see that there are absolute gaps in our knowledge, and we have flagged those, but look at the research community to fill those gaps.

V1: The movement into sensor development seems to be a bold move that requires investment. Is cost justification a part of the outreach effort?

McGlade: I would say that our Information Technology is very much at the cutting edge, and we try to encourage countries to really come with us, because we are seeking solutions that reduce costs. We have moved to the use and development of cheap sensors and to the cloud to reduce the operating cost of service. We are always looking out for the countries to make sure they can do the job in a cost-effective way.

When I first wanted to push sensors, I found as you might expect that the American continent had the bulk of sensor developers. We really didn’t have so many in the European setting. What I can see now is a very interesting phenomenon where there are fantastic sensor development, but they haven’t connected to the user. There are really smart approaches, with nanoscale sizes, but they haven’t found who is going to use them in many cases. On the other hand, there are many people that haven’t even thought of using a sensor, because they didn’t think it was possible.

While we can find one or two sensors that are fit for purpose, we need to think ourselves about shaping that whole industry. We have started doing that with contracts out for sensor development to ruggedize sensors, to prove the telecommunications package, and battery life, etc. I used to work a lot in the marine sector on instruments, and I think we can learn a lot from that technology development in many areas.

Sensors are the future. It is a way in which citizens, if properly priced, can participate. I’m after adding to what countries can do by having citizens bring in data and see it being used. It’s not just crowsdourcing, but professionalizing ways in which citizens can participate.

V1: Is the volume of data, and making sense of the data, a concern? How do we unlock all the data that has been collected, and that continually expands?

McGlade: Our next big step is to work with partners and to work on data tagging. If you have your own data, you will be ensured about your own intellectual property being attached to that, like a fingerprint. You’ll also be able to search for your data and see who is using it.

As a corollary, having approached some national institutes of science, I’m working toward creating the idea of a new career structure in academic research around people who do collect data. They don’t necessarily write scientific papers, but they form an incredibly important role by gathering information about the environment, whether it is monitoring data or one-off observations or collections.

I think we can unleash an enormous amount of knowledge that is currently sitting in shoe boxes and computers where there isn’t a home for it. I’m hoping to create a sort of marketplace for environmental information for sharing data about a place, and where you get credit if you collected the data.

V1: You’ve recently accepted an appointment to the Board of Directors of the Open Geospatial Consortium, and your discussion of the assurance of intellectual property ties into their work as well as their work on sensor standards. How important are standards for your vision?

McGlade: Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) is very important, and we need to always ensure that what we do with geospatial technology is SWE consistent. We need to bring data from sensors and automatically putit together with mapping, which requires these standards. What we want to see are very simple standards, and some of the OGC standards are very complicated. If I had one plea to that community it would be to simplify standards, otherwise people won’t adopt and deploy them and put them into practice.

You don’t want it to be so generic that it would lose relevance, but maybe we should be very careful about becoming too thematic and dogmatic. I do think standards are very important, to provide data exchange and interoperability, but I think we need to use them very carefully, otherwise we come obsessed about the standard as opposed to why we collect the data in the first place.

V1: On the mitigation side, is your organization involved much in issues of resilience, and bringing environments back to good health?

McGlade: We’re very involved. We’re writing the methods book for the United Nations on experimental accounts for ecosystems and ecosystem services that has just been approved in New York in June. The reason this is very important is because the system of national accounts—where we get our figures for GDP, employment figures, and so on—will now have a system on environmental accounting that will be linked. We are a very strong part of validating those figures. Eurostat partners and other statistical bodies have asked our agency to write the second part for experimental accounts for ecosystem services.

Through a process of linking to the system of national accounts, you can not so much put a value on ecosystem services, but you can put a cost of restoration. If you have a cost of restoration, it helps you identify from a dynamical sense, when and how interventions can cause the loss of resilience. So, there’s a combination of how the ecosystem functions (the services), and at what point through the cost benefit and the cost of restoration can you let it go to before you cross the threshold. That is the identification that we will be looking for as part of the accounting systems.

It’s a very fast-track piece of work that has to be completed by the Spring of 2013. We have a very strong sense that it will be used by a lot of countries, and I’m very hopeful that this will give us another layer of understanding on how the world works.

It is spatially explicit, and it is linked to the system of accounts that are spatial and to social and demographic mapping. It becomes a new accounting tool for both ecosystems and the environment.

V1: We’re very interested in the interface with the built world and the natural world, and have focused a good deal of our coverage on cities as it is a place where we can be most efficient. Is there a strong urban focus at your agency?

McGlade: This idea of resilience is very important for urban settings, because there is clearly critical mass when it comes to being effective around resources, facilities and services. There is also a sense in which the fragmentation patterns are equally important, such as urban spread and sprawl, which has its own spatial pattern. We’re looking at how that fragmentation process, which causes a loss of resilience, can be averted by anticipating how urban sprawl could occur and the implications. We are working on understanding how spreading sprawl in certain areas effects particular ecosystems, and putting together the right policies and decision making to avoid that.

It also leads to the idea that within the urban setting there is a certain resilience, such as how many people you pack into a certain area, and how much green space you provide, etc. I think that is an as yet untapped area, and it is why I believe that the three-dimensional tools are fascinating. They will enable architects to really play around with concepts such as maximum density, and also what that means for the resilience of facilities, family structures, and so on. I can see that we need to do a lot more on both urban patterns of living, but also how we intersperse and create different living environments within the urban setting.

V1: I live in a redevelopment community, and I’m constantly amazed at the capacity for natural resilience if we return a balance. For instance, daylighting a stream in my community has returned an abundance of nature to an area that was once covered by concrete.

McGlade: We started a wonderful project to return bees to the top of buildings, and it’s a social project that started with a young lad that wanted to help homeless and disenfranchised people. He worked with a hotel out by the Copenhagen airport to put the first hives on their roof. He trains disenfranchised people to look after bees. We made a small honey factory, and the honey from the beehives is harvested and sold. We harvested 60 litres of honey in one day.

What’s fascinating when you make cities think about bees is that they create these rivers of nectar. The idea that parks when connected will be able to run from one park to another. It’s really triggering what parks can do to support different pollinators. As you know, in many parts of the world there is an artificial pollination where bees are delivered and then moved on. What happens if you have a healthy bee population in a city is that the productivity in the gardens goes up by as much as 30 percent, because there is far more pollination success. People’s gardens become much more productive if there is a healthy bee an pollinator production.

It makes the whole city become more resilient, because you have this reinforcement of natural process going on. It doesn’t matter that it’s urban. The other thing that people don’t understand about bees is that they have a way to detect and reject bees that are contaminated or polluted, but they do allow bees that are slightly contaminated. During the regurgitation process the honey gets processed and stored in additional bees, so that the honey that comes out is absolutely pure.

The one thing they can’t deal well with though is pesticide. That’s why the honey in the countryside is often so much more contaminated than in the cities, because pesticides aren’t used in city parks. The honey from bees in cities is really clean.

We had a great breakthrough at a restaurant in Copenhagen called Noma that is supposed to be the world’s best restaurant. The chef there has led this whole movement on foraging for food. They are going to sell our honey, because they see it as the purest and best honey that they can have. What’s really nice is that there are five or six socially disadvantaged people who have a proper living harvesting our honey. It’s a great story, and I think it links to how cities can take on another capacity.

V1: It’s really interesting how our cities are now looking more closely at livability, walkability and quality of life issues in the planning process.

McGlade: How we can work together on projects like the bees has a real transformative place in our lives. Especially for people that live on their own, which they often do in cities. Most of the successes that we’ve seen, particularly in Scandinavia, is for places where people can come together to grow things in communal gardens. Even in very northern temperatures where it’s very difficult to grow things, having greenhouses annexed to buildings where people can commonly grow tomatoes, has a completely positive effect for people that live in those flats. Cities can be pretty good places to live, not always, but they can be.

It’s primarily about how people are brought together, and creating the infrastructure to bring people together are more the norm in some countries. In Finland for instance, they create these common areas. I think it’s learning by experience, which is why our agency puts a lot of store in the success stories, because you can look at those and understand how easy it is to do these things yourself. It’s about telling a story so that others can have inspiration, and hope that it gets replicated.

V1: With all these little positive steps, it’s also important to think with the seriousness that your talk started out with in terms of the impacts of climate change. You related that we’re in a dire situation, but that we can turn it around.

McGlade: We are in deep trouble, and we have to pay attention, even though we’re in the midst of a financial crisis. You only have to go to Greenland once to understand, and I go there a lot because we have an accord to support the government. Every time I go, our guide that goes out onto the ice every day, relates the speed in which the ice is melting. We have to adapt, we can still mitigate and we must mitigate. We’re going to have to learn a lot about how to live on a planet where things are very different.

Copenhagen for example was pretty much wiped out just a few weeks ago because more rain than ever fell in a very short span of time. The agency was flooded, and the whole city was flooded. We were within just a couple inches from the high voltage lines being flooded, which would have meant a very big explosion. These things are happening all the time now all over Europe and the world.

In the end, it is about people being helped to know what they rely on. If I were a business, I would want to know where my closest electric substation is, and if it is protected from flooding. In response, I’d hope to know that if I located my business in a safe area, and I took care of my infrastructure that my insurance premium would be different. I think that’s where the business sector needs to be more upbeat, and paying attention, to manage these impacts proactively. That’s why my agency is reaching out more to the small business community, letting them know that it is their duty and care to be informed. We will help you, we’ll make the data publicly available and transparent, we’ll tell you about the infrastructure, but then you need to act on it in a way that you’ve thought about what climate change will mean.

Written by Matt Ball Monday, 15 August 2011
Source

NUREMBERG, Germany, Sept. 27, 2011 — /PRNewswire/ — Trimble (NASDAQ: TRMB) announced the release of eCognition 8.7, a new version of its advanced software suite designed to extract information from a range of geospatial data including images, point clouds and Geographic Information System (GIS) vectors.

The software suite enables aerial imaging companies, geospatial data providers, scientists and end users to integrate and analyze earth observation and remote sensing data to generate accurate GIS-ready information.

The announcement was made today at INTERGEO 2011, the world’s largest conference on geodesy, geoinformatics and land management.

The software release features selective 3D: an innovative approach to combining 2D raster and vector data with statistical attributes derived directly from 3D point clouds. This is achieved by pinpointing the portions of a point cloud most relevant to the analysis and including just those portions within the processing. This offers the advantages inherent to 3D analysis without burdening CPUs with unutilized 3D datasets—a critical advantage for production image analysis.

Trimble’s eCognition 8.7 also incorporates state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to supplement its object classification ruleset environment. Classification and Regression Tree (CART) and Support Vector Machines (SVM) enable sophisticated data patterns to be detected with greater autonomy than previously possible. These capabilities are particularly valuable for the analysis and understanding of complex ecosystems.

“The eCognition software suite provides Trimble’s geospatial solution portfolio with key capabilities for the transformation of geospatial data into information. For example, this latest eCognition release offers improved utilization of point clouds, whether they are created using Trimble Harrier laser scanning or generated using image matching within Trimble’s Inpho software,” said Katherine Sandford, general manager of Trimble’s GeoSpatial Division. “The information extraction capabilities included within the latest eCognition release enable geospatial analysts to better understand the Earth’s complex systems and create the next generation of value-added mapping products.”

Trimble’s eCognition software extracts accurate geo-information from remote sensing data. eCognition’s intelligent information extraction capabilities accelerate mapping, change detection and object recognition by delivering standardized and reproducible image analysis results.

Availability

The eCognition 8.7 software suite is available now through Trimble’s eCognition distribution channel. Customers with a current maintenance contract can receive the upgrade at no additional cost.

About Trimble’s GeoSpatial Division

Trimble applies geospatial technologies to a variety of industry-specific workflows, enabling the seamless creation of geo-information from raw data. Trimble’s land and aerial mobile sensors capture geo-referenced images and point clouds that are interpreted using Trimble’s production-scale photogrammetry, terrain modeling and feature extraction software. The resulting high-fidelity models increase business productivity and improve decision-making for a diverse community of global customers, including aerial and land mapping service companies, governments, utilities and transportation. For more information, visit: www.trimble.com/geospatial.

About Trimble

Trimble applies technology to make field and mobile workers in businesses and government significantly more productive. Solutions are focused on applications requiring position or location—including surveying, construction, agriculture, fleet and asset management, public safety and mapping. In addition to utilizing positioning technologies, such as GPS, lasers and optics, Trimble solutions may include software content specific to the needs of the user. Wireless technologies are utilized to deliver the solution to the user and to ensure a tight coupling of the field and the back office. Founded in 1978, Trimble is headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif.

For more information, visit Trimble’s Web site at: www.trimble.com.
“Read more”: http://www.sacbee.com/2011/09/27/3941501/trimbles-introduces-ecognition.html#ixzz1ZL0tjwtR

Policy makers would be much better placed to combat the effects of global warming if scientists had access to accurate measurements of the Earth’s radiation balance from a dedicated satellite, claims an international group of physicists.

As well as collecting its own data, the spacecraft would also calibrate other Earth-observation satellites. The group is led by scientists at the UK’s National Physical Laboratory (NPL) and it estimates that the satellite could cut a decade or more from the time needed to make useful projections of global temperature at the end of the 21st century.

Climate scientists have become increasingly convinced that much of the global temperature rise seen over the last 50 years or so is due to the emission of man-made greenhouse gases. But they are not able to predict with any certainty the extent to which temperatures will increase over the course of the coming century. Indeed, the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said the increase could vary anywhere from about 1 to 6 °C. This uncertainty stems from the fact that a variety of different models are used – each making different assumptions about the Earth’s climate. One of the biggest single sources of uncertainty is the nature and magnitude of the feedback provided by changes to cloud cover as the planet warms.
Time cut in third

Reducing the uncertainties will involve continued space-based measurement of key climate variables such as cloud cover in order to compare these data with the values predicted by each of the various models. According to Nigel Fox of NPL, today’s space-based instruments require an observing period of 30 or 40 years before the uncertainties can be restricted to a range of about 1–2 °C. At this point governments will know whether and when they need to take major steps to combat climate change, such as building large flood barriers, or whether more modest changes will do the job. However, he and colleagues from the UK, US and Switzerland argue that this period could be cut to just 12 years following the launch of a satellite known as TRUTHS.

TRUTHS would measure the intensity and spectral composition of radiation coming directly from the Sun and radiation reflected back into space from Earth – with an accuracy about 10 times better than existing satellites. At the heart of the spacecraft would be an instrument containing a black cavity that absorbs incoming light. The power of that light is obtained by measuring the cavity’s temperature rise and then using an electrical heater to deliver a known power to cause the same increase in temperature.

This “electrical substitution radiometry” is already used in existing satellites, but is carried out at ambient temperatures, whereas the instrument inside TRUTHS would operate at about –250 °C. As such, it would be as accurate as radiometers used in metrology institutes on the ground. Although this accuracy will degrade with time, the TRUTHS instrument will remain more accurate than today’s instruments.

Taking NPL into orbit

Another satellite would be calibrated by pointing it and TRUTHS at the same bright surface (such as a snow field) and comparing the values obtained by each. “We would be effectively taking NPL into orbit”, says Fox, “just as if we were checking a customer’s light meter against our reference light meter.”

TRUTHS was first proposed to the European Space Agency (ESA) in 2002, and the proposal was updated last year with a €50–100m cost estimate. Since then a very similar but larger NASA mission called CLARREO has been put on hold, so Fox is hoping that ESA, or perhaps even the UK, will back the project on its own. “I’ve no doubt the mission will happen at some point,” he says, “but it is a question of how quickly it will happen.”
Some are unconvinced

However, Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University in the US, says he is “unconvinced that such a mission will provide any definitive answers”. In particular, he believes it will be difficult for TRUTHS to quantify cloud feedbacks given the dominant natural year-to-year variability in cloud cover.

Michael Lockwood of Reading University in the UK is more persuaded. He believes that poor calibration between different satellites hampers our understanding of long-term climate change, adding that “future generations will curse us” for not paying more attention to the problem. And he thinks that TRUTHS could offer a way of improving such calibration for measurements of cloud and surface reflectance. But he says the detailed implementation of this improvement still needs to be worked out.

Source
The research is described in Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 369 4028.

The second edition of MundoGEO#Connect (http://mundogeoconnect.com/2012/), the largest event of the geotechnologies sector of Latin America, has its dates already set: from May 29th to May 31st, 2012, at Frei Caneca Convention Center, in São Paulo (SP).

From now on, you can follow all of the innovations of the event, through the official site http://mundogeoconnect.com/2012/en. The portal of MundoGEO#Connect 2012 is a source of information to the event’s participants, press, lecturers and debaters, public bodies, private companies, and all the parties interested in the matters that involve the geospatial industry.

Reiterating the success of its first edition, which took place from June 14th to June 16th, 2011, MundoGEO#Connect 2012 should gather more than 10 thousand professionals, among those participating in the technical activities and in the trade fair, and those connected through the social nets and online seminars, (about 10% of the event will be broadcast).

Besides, great companies of the sector have already confirmed their sponsorship, such as Hexagon, one of the most important groups of the metrology sector and holder of Leica Geosystems, Erdas, Intergraph and recently of the brazilian company Sisgraph; Furtado Schmidt, representative, in Brazil, of the brands Garmin, Nikon and Spectra Precision; the group Santiago & Cintra, representative of Trimble, Topcon, Faro, Erdas, RapidEye and Navteq; and Alezi Teodolini, representative of Astech and Datageosis.

Other institutions, national and international, are also supporting the event, such as the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), Embrapa, São Paulo Company of Metropolitan Planning (Emplasa), City hall of São Paulo, Geospatial Information & Technology Association (Gita), International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS) and Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC).

Innovations of the event

Having the theme “Sharing information for a better world”, MundoGEO#Connect 2012 will highlight the current challenge involved in the production of geospatial data, following patterns that facilitate its full use by the community of users of information systems.

In this edition, the offer of stands at the fair of products and services of MundoGEO#Connect 2012 was enlarged in 50%. Moreover, the number of auditoriums for the activities of the event was enlarged in 100% in relation to the 2011 event.

According to Emerson Granemann, director and publisher of MundoGEO Group, the event will hold several seminars, courses and parallel events that will discuss the trends of geoprocessing, remote sensing, surveying, GPS and spatial data infrastructure, in the areas of oil & gas, mining, e-government, agribusinesses, mapping of big cities’ underground, environment, among others. “We have a lot of innovations for this second edition of the event. The MundoGEO#Connect awards will be enlarged in order to choose the best professionals, companies and projects of the year, starting with voting online and the votes from the judging committee.”

Some parallel events are already confirmed: Users of Geotechnologies from the State of São Paulo, Users of Geotechnologies from the Municipal district of São Paulo, National Spatial Data Infrastructure (Inde) and OGC Patterns.

As in 2011, this year’s edition of the event will also hold the 2nd MundoGEO#Connect Awards, an initiative that recognizes the works developed by companies, institutions and professionals of the geotechnologies sector.

MundoGEO#Connect 2011: success of audience

MundoGEO#Connect came from the perception of its creators on the subjects that had more repercussion in the main social nets, such as Twitter and Facebook, one of the platforms that provide the most interaction among the people. Thus, one of the objectives of the event is to connect the geospatial technologies users who are present at the event as well as the ones who are online, so that there is the sharing of ideas on the current scenery of the sector.

Statistics

In its first edition, MundoGEO#Connect counted on 88% of the sponsors’ and participants’ approval, according with a poll on the organization of the event. There were over 7,5 thousand connected professionals: 900 participants of seminars and mini-courses, 1,8 thousand visitors to the fair and more than 5 thousand internet users that followed the event online, through Twitter and through webinars.

The poll numbers point out that 32% of the participants are directors and 33% are managers or coordinators; 50% come from the private sector and 36% come from the public sector; and that the areas of interest with larger percentages are environment, natural resources, utilities, infrastructure and territorial planning.

Pablo Santos, who works at the Superintendency of Economical and Social Studies of the State of Bahia, points out that the event provides “a unique opportunity to work, and share experiences with other public or private organizations in relation to the projects that take place in the most diversified Brazilian states”.

Furthermore, over 100 lecturers were present at the event, including representatives of international companies, such as the president of Erdas, Joel Campbell. “This is an extremely important event to the geotechnologies market, especially in Brazil, because there are more than 2 thousand people participating, who came from all around Latin America, Europe, Africa, and it is also an important conference where the hardware and software suppliers, the data providers are gathered to share ideas on how they can work together”, comments the executive, at an exclusive interview to MundoGEO.

Among the outstanding people who participated in the event were Tarun Bhatnagar, director of enterprise geo of Google in Latin America, that took part in the 2nd Google Earth for Companies Seminar; Wolfgang Bidermann, businessman from RapidEye; Dale Lutz, vice-president of products development of Safe Software; and Mike Reslow, representative of ISPRS.

On MundoGEO#Connect

MundoGEO#Connect 2012 is the largest event in the section of geospatial technologies of Latin America and it will take place from May 29th to May 31st , at Frei Caneca Convention Center, in São Paulo (SP). Holding the theme “Sharing information for a better world”, the expectation is to gather 10.000 professionals from the sector, among those participating in the seminars and courses, the visitors of the trade fair and the ones connected from distance through webinar and social nets. The event is an accomplishment of MundoGEO Group, along with the popularization of MundoGEO and InfoGPS web portals, InfoGEO, InfoGNSS and A Mira magazines, and it also counts on the international support from OGC, ISPRS and Gita, and popularization of Directions Magazine, GIM International, V1 Magazine, Professional Surveyor and Geo Connexion. The first edition of MundoGEO#Connect was held from June 14th to June 16th, 2011, in São Paulo, and it gathered more than 7,5 thousand people.

On MundoGEO Group

MundoGEO Group, which promotes MundoGEO#Connect, has been working in the production of contents for printed and online media, trade fairs, seminars, courses and webinars in the geoinformation area since 1998. It also publishes two important magazines addressed to the sector: InfoGEO, on satellite images and Geographic Information Systems (GIS); and InfoGNSS, which focus on land surveying and cartography. In this area the company counts on MundoGEO Web Portal, which provides daily content in Portuguese, Spanish and English, and which is a leader in the number of visitors in Latin America. In content partnership with UOL, it acts in the geo mobility area with InfoGPS Portal, which, along with MundoGEO, has over 50.000 registered professionals and more than 10.000 thousand followers in the social nets. In relation to the sustainability area, it maintains the Sustainable Attitude Web Portal, also in partnership with UOL.

Source

EOpages is a brokerage platform to help potential customers find suppliers whilst service providers will be able to promote their products.

what is EOPages?

EOpages is a brokerage platform to help potential customers find suppliers whilst service providers will be able to promote their products.

The Earth Observation value added Industry is quickly evolving. It has a pool of resources and services which must be organized, catalogued and presented in a unified tool. eopages.eu is being designed for this purpose. It will be an active business-to-business website promoting the European and Canadian geo-information service industry creating a meeting point between industry and market.

EOpages specialised online directory is aimed as comunication platform between potential user and suppliers encouraging business exchanges. EOpages is expected to be another breakthrough to improve even further the representation of European Earth Observation Industry in a variety of contexts working in partnership with industry and stakeholders.

what is our aim?

The aim of EOpages project is to enable potential customers to explore and interact with users in online content on the capabilities of EO industry in general and EO VA companies in particular by identifying relevant information via an in-depth crawling of geoinformation companies and organising, classifying and displaying the results.

EOpages will ensure that information is easily accessible as well as offering a “meeting point” to build and grow connections between industry and the market. It will include many innovative features to assist customers and to identify solutions for their markets.

EOpages is expected to be another breakthrough to improve even further the representation of European Earth Observation Industry in a variety of contexts working in partnership with industry and stakeholders.

who we are?

The European Space Agency (ESA) has sponsored EOpages under eovox project, in collaboration with the European Association of Remote Sensing Companies, EARSC.

EARSC —on a non-profit basis— coordinates and promotes activities of their members in the area of services based on the delivery of geo-information products on customer demand. EARSC´s mission is to foster development of European geo-information service industry. Our VISION is a sustainable market for geo-information services, using remote sensing data, which is openly accessible to all members. To achieve this we will focus on: -Customer awareness and acceptance of Earth observation and remote sensing -Improving Market access for our members.

What is EOPages.pdf

Exchange of views on future EU space policy at the European Parliament

During the meeting of the European Parliament’s Committee on Industry, Research and Energy (ITRE) on 30-31 August, the rapporteur Aldo Patriciello – Group of the European People’s Party, Italy – held an exchange of views on the Communication “Towards a space strategy for the European Union that benefits its citizens”.

This Communication aims at reinforcing Europe’s space infrastructure and calls for supporting research to increase European technological non-dependence, fosters cross-fertilisation between the space sector and other industry sectors, and boosts innovation as a driver of European competitiveness. Implementing the European Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) programme with Member States is among the priorities set out by the Communication.

The consideration of the draft report will take place on 5/6 October. The deadline for amendments is 12 October. The vote in ITRE is scheduled for 22/23 November and the vote in Plenary for December 2011.

More information is available at Europarl