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China launched a remote sensing satellite

China on Monday 12 Nov. 2007 launched a remote sensing satellite to carry out land resource surveying, just weeks after it sent off its first lunar orbiter. The “Yaogan III” satellite will also be used for collecting data for crop yield estimate and disaster prevention, Xinhua news agency reported. It was launched on a Long March carrier rocket from the Taiyuan Satellite Launching Centre in the northern province of Shanxi.
Source: SpaceDaily/AFP

Vista GmbH is a value adding company working in the field of remote sensing applications in geosciences. The main application areas in which Vista is active are yield estimation of agricultural crops, modelling of evapotranspiration, runoff and ground water recharge, advanced land use classifications using GIS-tools, observations of snow cover and water bodies, and precipitation and soil moisture observation for flood modelling and forecast.

Consultancy and special services as well as software development are main parts of Vista’s activities in the field of remote sensing for hydrological and agricultural applications. Dedicated solutions and applications are developed in accordance with the customer’s requirements.

Within national and international projects we concentrate on our main field of expertise: remote sensing. To fully utilize remote sensing data and to gain valuable information from images, process models and GIS-methods are necessary tools. The combined application of these methods is Vista‘s special know-how.

Our concept

Vista was founded in 1995 by Dr. Heike Bach and Prof. Dr. Wolfram Mauser, Director of the Institute for Geography and Head of the Remote Sensing Laboratory at the University of Munich as a private company. Its major aim is to transform the scientific methods developed in geosciences and remote sensing into practical applications. Through this the gap between research results and customer’s needs is bridged. In February 2000 the legal form of the company changed to a GmbH (Limited) to meet the growing demands and facilitate international cooperations.

Source VISTA

A consortium led by VEGA IT GmbH (VEGA), the specialist professional services company, has been selected to undertake one of two parallel studies to perform the Phase A Analysis for the EUMETSAT Meteosat Third Generation (MTG) Ground Segment.

The contract is worth €500k.

The study, which began at the end of October, involves analysing the key issues for the MTG ground segment, and providing initial concepts for the ground segment design. This will include looking at the areas of re-use from other EUMETSAT programmes.

The VEGA-led consortium including SciSys and GMV was selected due to its overall coverage of end-to-end ground segment systems and its full understanding of system level issues.

VEGA has worked with EUMETSAT since its establishment in 1986 providing technical consultancy and engineering support to all their programmes. This includes the current geostationary programme, Meteosat Second Generation (MSG), for climate monitoring and weather research satellites. Support started with the procurement in 1993 and continues today with the operations and maintenance of the satellites and ground segment.

John Auburn, VEGA’s Business Development Director for Aerospace, said: “This contract is strategically important for VEGA as we continue to strengthen our end-to-end ground segment capabilities, especially with respect to Earth Observation programmes. Through our involvement in Phase A, it allows us to use our experience to help define the road map for the remainder of this programme.”

Further information
For further information and images, please contact Karen Rogers by e-mail at karen.rogers@vega.co.uk.

Telespazio is proud to present its Love Planet Earth 2008 calendar

The calendar is dedicated to the North and South Poles

Telespazio is proud to present its Love Planet Earth 2008 calendar, dedicated – in the International Polar Year – to the coldest places on Earth, those where global warming has had the biggest impact.

Through magnificent high-resolution satellite images, the calendar illustrates how Alaska, Siberia and Antarctica are the first regions to show the visible igns of our planet’s suffering. 2008 will be an important year for reflection and action in our efforts to tackle issues such as pollution, changes to ecosystems and the melting ice caps. The Arctic and Antarctic play a key role in regulating the Planet’s temperatures and weather systems. Understanding this mechanism is a great challenge for science, which requires continuous, global and highly detailed imagery data. Satellite images can provide objective information on these phenomena, and help to identify solutions that provide a better future for the Planet.

Download Love Planet Earth 2008 calendar

Love Planet Earth 2008 website

Studying ground movements using its own PSInSAR™ technique

TRE has been awarded a major contract from the Regional Government of Lombardy (Northern Italy) to continue studying ground movements using its own PSInSAR™ technique.

As already carried out in a previous 2001-project, TRE will provide satellite-derived PS measures to monitor wide areas in Lombardy, threatened by ground deformations.

Now we will process both ERS1/2 historical archives (1992-2000) and up-to-date Radarsat data to obtain information suitable for land mapping and change detection.

Source TRE

SSF was formed in the early 1990s following a research project relating to the measurement of atmospheric ozone.

Since then, SSF have participated in several demanding scientific computation projects, most of which have related to software running at satellite ground stations in an automated processing environment. This includes several software components with near real-time requirements for the product generation. As the scientific algorithms implemented can also be quite complex, many of these projects have been computationally challenging.

The GOMOS Processing Facility contains data processors from Level 0 to 1b and 2 that use algorithms defined by the ESA Expert Support Laboratory (ESL). The main objective of the level 1 processing is to correct the GOMOS measurement data for all instrument effects before using the data for scientific atmosphere analysis. From these products, Level 2 products that contain atmospheric profiles of O3, H2O, NO2, NO3, and O2 are constructed. Auxiliary L2 products are air density, high-resolution temperature profiles and aerosol extinction coefficients. The Level 2 processing is accomplished through several inversion steps.
SSF have developed several Product Generation Executives (PGEs) for processing data from the OMI instrument.

These contain PGEs for creating the following Level 2 products:

• Ozone vertical column
• Cloud product
• NO2 vertical column
• Aerosol product
• Ozone profile

During the OMI PGE projects, SSF also developed a mathematical library containing several ‘general purpose’ functions that are common for the PGEs. These include linear and non-linear fitting functions, linear fitting using singular value decomposition, spline interpolation, n-dimensional linear interpolation and several small utility functions.

Source SSF

Skysoft has been awarded a contract by the European Space Agency to port and optimize the performance of the MERISAT tool

This tool generates the Look-Up-Tables which are used by the operational MERIS instrument processor in order to enhance overall processing performance.

The MERIS instrument is a programmable, medium-spectral resolution, imaging spectrometer operating in the solar reflective spectral range, and is one of the nine Earth-observation instruments on ENVISAT that gather information about the earth (land, water, ice, and atmosphere) using a variety of measurement principles.

The current version of the MERISAT tool is running on a SUN-SPARC workstation under the Solaris 2.6.x operating system with OpenWindows 3.x environment, and to assure its long-term maintainability this will be ported to a Linux operating system.

Source SKYSOFT

ReSAC was a subcontractor in a project related with the flood risk management using satellite information for a pilot region in Bulgaria. The project goals were to model high water level and to detect flooded area based on satellite images.

In the autumn of 2007 ReSAC participated in a pilot project for developing of a methodology and modeling application for forecasting of potential losses from Iskar river floods for the region of Novi Iskar, Bulgaria.

The main contractor of the project was Agency for Sustainable Development and Eurointegration – ASDE with subcontractors Remote Sensing Application Center – ReSAC and National Institute for Meteorology and Hydrology – NIMH.

The main beneficiary of the project is Sofia Municipality and the project was fulfilled with the coordination of the State Agency for Information Technologies and Communications – SAITC.

The pilot project is in relation with:

- Municipal program “Local Agenda 21”; – Annual program for participation of Bulgaria in the decision making process of EU (2007) – Scientific-applicable task of SAITC for risk management; – Bulgarian-French project “BULGARISK” for application of satellite images for risk management; – Pilot project for monitoring on the base of remote sensing, including fast-track services; – GMES Program; – URBAN-NET, FP6.

In the past couple of years ASDE and ReSAC are introducing and implementing in Bulgaria the good European practices in the area of risk management using satellite information. As a non-profit organizations ASDE and ReSAC are cooperating with numerous governmental, NGO, scientific and private organizations by forming public-private partnerships – PPP in order by optimal cooperation to fulfill better the tasks. The present project is an example of such partnership. The development of a methodology for estimating potential losses from floods aims not only to respond to the current European requirements, but also to respond the real practical problems, which occur in the area of Sofia Municipality during the floods in 2005 and 2006.

The project had the following tasks: – Developing of a methodology for flood simulation and analyses of potential losses, prediction of flooded area along Iskar river in the Novi Iskar region; – Integration of GIS information with satellite images; – Developing of a methodology for metadata for satellite images; – Testing of different DEMs for flood modeling.

The project followed the main principles from the new European directive for floods issued on 23th October 2007. The aim of the EU Flood Directive is to reduce and manage the risks that floods pose to human health, the environment, infrastructure and property. According to the EU Flood Directive, Member States will have to reduce flood risk for those areas where the risk is deemed significant. This is done by first determining the extent of flood risk (through flood hazard mapping and flood risk mapping). Consequently, objectives for flood risk reduction have to be established, as well as the measures that will be taken to reach these objectives. These are laid down in flood risk management plans.

The project shows also some of the GMES services for provision of information products for floods based on earth observation technologies.

The project area is of about 80 sq.km. and covers part of the Iskar river watershed in the Sofia Valley.

The project was focused on two big floods which occur in June and August 2005. In order to analyse the flooded area 4 satellite images were used:

Details Satellite
SPOT-5! Ikonos IRS LISS IRS LISS
Date 19/08/2004 16/06/2005 30/06/2005 12/08/2005
Spatial resolution 5 m 1 m 23 m 23 m

Map of the flooded areas: June-August 2005

Because the satellite images are used as a base for creation of different information products it is very important information for the source and processing of the images to be available, or so called metadata.

ReSAC, using part of the methodology of JRC/EC for metadata for satellite images created a modified templates by which to describe the processed images. These metadata include information about the raw image, geometric processing performed, and information about the GCPs, ICPs and orthorectification accuracy as well as information for the final product delivered.

The developed methodology is open for new modifications based on the new European rules for exchange and maintenance of spatial information, which is to be accepted in the next years.

Based on topographic maps and satellite images different GIS layers were created which to be used in the flood modeling such as:

- road network; – ditches and dikes; – river and channel network; – DEM in scale 1:5000

In order to model hydraulically the water flow the MIKE 11 software was used. The model was fed with various hidro-meteorological information from the National Institute for Meteorology and Hydrology: water levels, water quantities; meteorological data.

Because the DEM was prepared from topomaps which were not updated in the previous 15 years several cross sections were measured with precise instruments in the flooded area in order to obtain information for the riverbed and detailed information for the relief of the flood plain.

The model results were compared with the real flooded area digitized from the satellite images and this information was used to assess the types of land use flooded in June and August 2005.


Comparison between the model result and real flooded area based on satellite images (Ikonos and IRS LISS) for both floods

The good results from this pilot project will continue in a new project which to cover the whole Sofia Valey and all the main rivers which passes through it.

For more information:
Remote Sensing Application Center – ReSAC

As an ongoing series, RapidEye will keep you informed each quarter of how our service business provides solutions to customers worldwide…

Germany’s largest agricultural insurance company, Vereinigte Hagel, made the decision this year to provide crop insurance in Lithuania, and RapidEye helped to make this transition a success.

RapidEye is a long-term partner with Vereinigte Hagel, developing and implementing advanced geo-information based agro-insurance solutions. When asked to collaborate on the Lithuanian project to come up with an innovative IT solution, our software and data base experts were up to the challenge.

“We are extremely proud of our staff who worked side by side with people from Vereinigte Hagel, The Lithuanian Agri-Information and Rural Business Centre (VIC) and Munich RE to realize a very complex system in such a short time”, reported RapidEye’s Head of Product Development Dr. Frederik Jung-Rothenhäusler.

With the system elements RapidEye has developed, farmers in Lithuania can now apply for crop insurance or make claims on their policies entirely online. Vereinigte Hagel will then use the information this system garners in a web-based Management GIS (Geo- Information-System) tool giving them an overview of multi-regional crop insurance risks within Lithuania.

Source Rapideye

PCI Geomatics to support satellites WorldView-1 and TerraSAR-X / PCI Geomatics releases latest version of GeomaticaX / PCI Geomatics to support satellites WorldView-1 and TerraSAR-X along with improvements for ALOS

*PCI Geomatics to support satellites WorldView-1 and TerraSAR-X *

PCI Geomatics, a world-leading developer of software and solutions for geospatial imaging applications, is pleased to announce its support of image products from the satellites WorldView-1 and TerraSAR-X, and enhanced coverage for ALOS (Advanced Land Observing Satellite) in the form of additional JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) files support.

“PCI Geomatics remains at the forefront of the geospatial industry by providing software to enable our customers to utilize the best sensors currently available,” said Michael Agnes, Director of Software Sales, PCI Geomatics. “With each release of our software, our list of supported sensors has grown, and we are delighted to include WorldView-1 and TerraSAR-X to this list.”

PCI Geomatics will support the satellites via data import, orthorectification models, image mosaics and advanced data fusion techniques (including pan sharpening) as well as stereo DEM generation.

Increased Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) file support includes import and orthocorrection of JAXA Level 1.5 PALSAR data.
More info

PCI Geomatics releases latest version of GeomaticaX

PCI Geomatics is pleased to announce the latest release of GeomaticaX, a toolkit for creating customized workflows and automated processing chains, using Python scripting language and C++ and Java programming languages.

This latest release of GeomaticaX consists of version 1.2 of PCI Geomatics’ Professional Software Development Kit (ProSDK), and a suite of ProPacks. Each ProPack contains a set of software components that address specific geomatics application areas including orthorectification, mosaicking, elevation extraction, and pansharpening and extends the capabilities of the ProSDK. These software components represent PCI Geomatics’ core technology and are called PCI Pluggable Functions (PPFs).

The ProSDK version 1.2 offers a flexible development environment and more accessible functionality. The new ProPacks support hyperspectral analysis, layer-to-layer conversion, an ALOS and CARTOSAT model and more. These additions complement the suite of existing solution technology such as our enterprise data support and file format support (NITF).

“This ProSDK and ProPacks release has over twice as many PPFs as the version 1.1 release and the amount of automated, repeatable testing applied to this product has increased along with its size in order to maintain a high level of quality,” said Dr. Richard Pollock, Director of Research and Development at PCI Geomatics.

GeomaticaX is available for Windows XP and Linux. PCI Geomatics is a world-leading developer of software and solutions for geospatial imaging applications, and our Professional Services Group is available to deliver straightforward solutions that incorporate ProSDK and ProPacks software into your prerequisites.

For more information on ProSDK and ProPacks, visit

PCI Geomatics to support satellites WorldView-1 and TerraSAR-X along with improvements for ALOS

PCI Geomatics, a world-leading developer of software and solutions for geospatial imaging applications, is pleased to announce its support of image products from the satellites WorldView-1 and TerraSAR-X, and enhanced coverage for ALOS (Advanced Land Observing Satellite) in the form of additional JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) files support.

“PCI Geomatics remains at the forefront of the geospatial industry by providing software to enable our customers to utilize the best sensors currently available,” said Michael Agnes, Director of Software Sales, PCI Geomatics. “With each release of our software, our list of supported sensors has grown, and we are delighted to include WorldView-1 and TerraSAR-X to this list.”

PCI Geomatics will support the satellites via data import, orthorectfication models, image mosaics and advanced data fusion techniques (including pan sharpening) as well as stereo DEM generation.

Increased Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) file support includes import and orthocorrection of JAXA Level 1.5 PALSAR data.

Owned and operated by Digital Globe, WorldView-1 was recently launched to provide highly detailed imagery for precise map creation, change detection and in-depth image analysis. WorldView-1 is a panchromatic imaging system featuring half-meter resolution imagery.

TerraSAR-X is an earth observation satellite that uses an X-band SAR to provide high-quality topographic information for commercial and scientific applications. Infoterra holds the exclusive commercial exploitation rights.
For more information.

About PCI Geomatics
PCI Geomatics is a world-leading developer of geospatial software, specializing in remote sensing, digital photogrammetry, spatial analysis, cartographic production, and, more recently, automated production systems. Today, with our trusted Geomatica® brand, PCI Geomatics provides all the image-centric solutions necessary to meet the expectations of a large and expanding industry. Since 1982, the company and its reputation have continued to grow as a result of innovative leadership, strong technology partnerships, active geomatics community involvement, and a dedication to earn the trust of customers who use PCI Geomatics.

For more information
pcigeomatics
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Alysia Vetter
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Tel: 819-770-0022, Ext. 233
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Email: vetter@pcigeomatics.com