Geoscience Australia’s Innovation Showcase will highlight recent and ongoing geoscience innovations with the potential to influence the Australian Government’s ability to use geoscience for more effective decision making:
The Australian Geoscience Data Cube: From satellites to insights and better decisions. The transformation of 40 years of Landsat satellite images into a comprehensive continental analysis system that can tell us how our land and water has changed and provides tools to monitor change into the future (Trevor Dhu)
Moving Australia into the future with a modern spatial reference system. The promise of high-precision GPS to enable automated vehicles and more is dependent on having a high-precision datum – how do you do that when the Earth’s crust itself is moving? (Dan Jaksa)
Mineral Potential Mapper – using mineral systems science and data integration to predict the next big one. Mining is a key component of the Australian economy, but discovering and developing and ore body takes decades. How can we use our geoscience data to accelerate discovery and encourage investment? (Richard Blewett, Karol Czarnota)
The talks will be followed by a 30 minute Q&A panel session. This public seminar is presented as part of the Geoscience Australia Wednesday Seminar series.
Renewable energy has introduced itself today into the arena of alternative energy sources. It is important to have a very good knowledge of local solar resources. Though this local resource is available its access is difficult and limited.
The centre O.I.E. (Observation, Impacts, Energy) of MINES ParisTech/ARMINES seized this question and developed a platform allowing the exchange of in-situ measurements for the actors of the photovoltaic domain.
This video support the development of the and the outcome of the ConnectinGEO Task 5.2 « Industry Energy Challenge”
SANDIEGO, Calif.— SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today unveiled SAP® Geographical Enablement Framework, powered by SAP HANA®, which helps organizations enrich business applications with geographic data from geographic information systems (GIS), such as Esri ArcGIS. This announcement was made at the Esri User Conference being held June 27–July 1 in San Diego.
“In many asset-intensive industries such as energy, transportation and public sector, the ability to visualize business objects on maps is critical to improving efficiency and decision making,” said Irfan Khan, GM and global head, Database & Data Management, SAP. “SAP Geographical Enablement Framework, powered by SAPHANA, can help organizations streamline the processing of both enterprise and spatial data for greater location awareness across business processes.”
Enriching Business Processes with Geospatial Information
To develop spatially enabled business applications, organizations can use the framework to:
Enable smooth integration and bidirectional navigation between SAP applications and Esri ArcGIS. * Developers can use application programming interfaces (APIs) published by GIS systems to fetch geospatial data. Also, business data augmented with geometric attributes can be published as a service, so that GIS users can access SAP business data from within their GIS tools.
Embed a responsive map user interface (UI) in a business application to display both business and spatial data simultaneously to provide greater insight.
Store the geometry of any SAP business object in the SAPHANA platform and accelerate spatial data processing in memory to deliver real-time insights, enriched with spatial context, to improve decision making.
Visualize, filter and search for business objects — such as functional location, equipment, linear assets, notifications or work orders — on a map from within a spatially enabled application. From a desktop or a tablet, users can also drill down through multiple map layers to gain better insight.
Accelerating Business and Spatial Data Processing with SAPHANA
With continued collaboration between SAP and Esri, organizations can gain contextual insight from business and spatial data, enabling business and GIS users to work within the same multiuser access and editing environment.
“At EDF Renewable Energy, we have built a truly innovative enterprise business intelligence and data warehouse platform that combines Esri geospatial data along with asset sensor data and ERP transactional data in SAPHANA,” said Devang Shah, manager of database and business intelligence, EDF Renewable Energy. “This provides us with near real-time insights to help us operate more efficiently.”
As an open platform, SAPHANA is certified with the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), enabling organizations to easily consume spatial data from third-party spatial solutions that also adhere to the standard. SAPHANA also supports synchronous and asynchronous imports of data from any spatial reference system (SRS) or coordinate reference system (CRS) to ease access to local, regional or global geographic entities. In addition, native geocoding delivered by SAPHANA smart data quality helps rapidly convert addresses to latitude and longitude within SAPHANA.
“Munich Re is one of the leading reinsurance companies in the world,” said Andreas Siebert, head of geospatial solutions at Munich Re. “We use spatial data processing capabilities in SAPHANA, in conjunction with predictive analytics, to assess risk — such as to identify natural hazard profiles for millions of locations around the globe, to efficiently coordinate loss adjustors after a major catastrophe or to calculate how many hospitals, schools and roads may be impacted by an impending hurricane or flood.”
Increasing Location Intelligence with SAP BusinessObjects™ Solutions
SAP is helping breaking down the silos between GIS and business data. Organizations can use the native geospatial features within SAP BusinessObjects™ Cloud and SAP BusinessObjects Lumira software to enrich data with geographic information and map visualizations. Business users can also contextualize business performance metrics by using powerful location intelligence capabilities within SAP Digital Boardroom, experienced through SAP BusinessObjects Cloud.
Business users can overlay business data on maps with detailed geographic information such as topography and satellite imagery. These maps can have multiple layers of different types of data, enabling business users to visualize information in various ways, such as a heat map layer to visualize data density and a choropleth map layer to highlight statistically significant geographic areas using shades or patterns.
“The SAP BusinessObjects BI Location Intelligence application by Galigeo brings the power of location visualization and analytics from Esri to SAP BusinessObjects Lumira, SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio and SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence®,” said Cristian Tapia, CEO at Galigeo. “Users can seamlessly blend their own spatial data into these SAP tools to gain new insights for decision making by fully exploiting the location dimension of their data.”
For more information, visit the SAP News Center. Follow SAP on Twitter at @sapnews.
About SAP
As market leader in enterprise application software, SAP (NYSE: SAP) helps companies of all sizes and industries run better. From back office to boardroom, warehouse to storefront, desktop to mobile device – SAP empowers people and organizations to work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively to stay ahead of the competition. SAP applications and services enable approximately 310,000 business and public sector customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably. For more information, visit www.sap.com.
By 2025, China plans to launch one Fengyun-II satellite, four Fengyun-IIIs, three Fengyun-IVs and another 6 for multiple meteorological purposes, Wu Yanhua, deputy head of the State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence, said at a seminar on Fengyun satellite development.
Fengyun satellites are a series of remote-sensing meteorological satellites developed by China. The Fengyun series is an important part of the earth observation satellite system.
China has launched 14 Fengyun satellites since 1988, with seven still in orbit as part of the World Meteorological Organization network.
A new web map allows for an interactive view of the impact of electricity in India. The spread of electricity in India has been an ongoing objective for more than 20 years, however, there are still more than 310 million people in mostly rural areas that still don’t have electricity in their homes.
The Rajiv Gandhi Grameen Vidyutikara Youani (RGGVY) national program to spread electricity in the country launched in 2005. The RGGVY program has four main focuses: construction of a rural electricity distribution backbone, electrification of villages that have more than 100 people, creating distributed generation networks in areas where connecting to the grid is cost prohibitive, and providing free power connections to households below the poverty line.
Using satellite imagery of light output from villages at night, University of Michigan researchers explored light output of 600,000 villages. The light at night make up 4.4 billion data points that help RGGVY and other stakeholders with verification of the spread of electricity over a 20-year timeframe.
The government of India will undergo a detailed mapping effort of all the mineral resources in the country. The country is known as a mineral-rich area with 28 varieties of minerals that include precious stones. The minerals that will be mapped include diamonds, iron ore, coal, limestone, dolomite, tin ore, bauxite and gold.
The national government unveiled the National Mineral Exploration Policy on Monday, calling for comprehensive exploration of non-fuel and non-coal mineral resources. The objective is to boost the national economy through mineral exploration.
Satellite imagery, and other space-based sensing, will contribute for both mineral exploration as well as checking for illegal mining.
Private agencies will carry out exploration with the right to a certain share of revenue from mineral auctions. The revenue share is seen as a means to reduce costs.
The legislation also calls for a National Geoscience Data Repository that will form the baseline for mineral exploration and will be open as a public good.
South America’s Amazon basin, El Niño conditions in 2015 and early 2016 reduced rainfall during the wet season, leaving the region drier at the start of the 2016 dry season than any year since 2002.
The Amazon fire forecast analyzes the relationship between certain climate observations and active fire detections from NASA satellites to predict fire-season severity. Developed in 2011 by scientists at the University of California, Irvine, and NASA, the forecast model is focused particularly on the link between sea-surface temperatures and fire activity. Warmer sea-surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific (as observed during an El Niño) and Atlantic oceans shift rainfall away from the Amazon region, increasing the risk of fire during dry months.
“Severe drought conditions at the start of the dry season have set the stage for extreme fire risk in 2016 across the southern Amazon,” said Doug Morton, an Earth scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and a co-creator of the fire forecast.
For 2016, El Niño-driven conditions are far drier than in 2005 and 2010—the last years when the region experienced drought. The prediction team developed a Web tool to track the evolution of the fire season in near-real time by Amazon region. Estimated fire emissions from each region are updated daily based on active fire detections—made by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument on NASA’s Terra satellite—and data from previous years in the Global Fire Emissions Database. So far, the region has seen more fires through June 2016 than in previous years, another indicator of a potentially tough season.
EUROSENSE (in cooperation with the Dutch company Hermess) was selected to execute a research project on air quality modelling in cities using detailed 3D city models.
The purpose of the study is to find the right balance between production time of the 3D model based on recent satellite data (e.g. Sentinel)and the best quality that can be handled by the actual air quality models, without losing the necessary details that influence the dispersion of polluted air in a 3D city environment.
EUROSENSE as a specialist in 3D city models and Hermess as a company with a large experience in air quality models are very pleased with this promising cooperation. If successful, this project could result in the set-up of a world-wide service.
Now Astrosat, one of Europe’s most consistently award-winning space services and management companies, is throwing open a challenge to space innovators everywhere to join in the international effort to help realise the possibilities of space.
NASA’s Juno probe has arrived at Jupiter after a five year voyage and is about to probe the gas giant’s deep interior.
Work is proceeding apace on the InSight mission to Mars.
Earth is under observation as never before by the most sophisticated satellites ever made by man.
Around the world, questing, adventurous agencies, companies and individuals are pushing the boundaries of space technology with missions which enable science to seek out and answer some of the most fundamental questions in the universe.
Now Astrosat, one of Europe’s most consistently award-winning space services and management companies, is throwing open a challenge to space innovators everywhere to join in the international effort to help realise the possibilities of space.
This time we want to revolutionise the way earth observation can solve problems on Earth – at a fraction of the cost and in a fraction of the time by working with innovators to place bespoke sensors in orbit – sensors with missions designed to solve problems End to End.
Astrosat want the world to come up with ideas that need Earth Observation data from the Copernicus suite, but also from data that currently isn’t available, for example, maybe they need better resolution or specific spectral bands.
Astrosat will use this information to determine what kind of sensor you need and get it placed onboard Teledyne Brown’s MUSES platform on the International Space Station!
In association with engineering giant Teledyne Brown, Astrosat is asking participants in the prestigious European Copernicus Masters Challenge to design a new earth observation suite of sensors which can be placed on-board Teledyne Brown’s Multi-User System for Earth Sensing (MUSES) platform on the International Space Station (ISS).
As a frequent Copernicus Masters winner, Astrosat will sit on the judging panel for entries and will look at entrants as potential partners in its commercial exploitation of space. Special focus will be placed on applications which help developing nations with disaster relief, or in increasing their economic resilience.
Once again, Astrosat is changing the way space solutions are delivered through earth observation. It is co-opting Copernicus entrants into its business philosophy, which is: Tell us the problem and we’ll solve it.
Astrosat’s access to the international space station can speed up the process – and ISS is much more specific than other satellites.
Steve Lee, Astrosat’s CEO, said: “Traditionally Earth Observation solutions are a technology push – long lifetime and expensive satellites are launched and the data has to be squeezed into a solution.
“BUT what if the solution needs something not up there, what if the budget and timescales don’t fit or don’t need a long campaign using big satellites.
“What if the satellites are in the wrong orbit (most earth observation happens from polar orbits.) We can change all of that with our ISS solution and we want the world to bring its ideas to us through the competition.
“Our new COO Georgy Dean has made a short video which you should watch.”
THEEXAMPLES
Here’s some examples of applications we’ve looked at ourselves – to spark your innovative thinking!
Urban heat island effect. Urban heat islands are an increasing concern in built-up areas. Copernicus data can be used to provide detail indicating where above average temperatures are being experienced. Current thermal sensors in space have too low resolution. An adapted off-the-shelf thermal sensor on-board Teledyne Brown’s MUSES platform on the ISS gives better information about potential threats and allows us to “profile” the equatorial regions over a short campaign with data spread across the full daily cycle of heat islands.
Algal blooms. Harmful algal blooms cause huge economic losses worldwide. Currently the repeat times for optical images of the algal blooms are too low. By using a sensor adapted for algal bloom observation on Teledyne Brown’s MUSES platform, alongside Copernicus data, repeat times are greatly increased and harmful algal blooms can be detected more frequently, increasing the likelihood of a cloud-free image. Furthermore, Algal blooms come in many forms – some good some bad – all with different spectral signatures. Our sensors could look for specific types of good or bad bloom.
In General.
Can you think of any other new business applications for the above sensors? Do you have a sensor or a plan for a constellation that needs tested in space whilst also giving valuable Copernicus supporting data in the near term? Come to us with your ideas.
THEPRIZE
The winner will be awarded a bespoke support package prize valued at €8,000 that includes business and technical assistance to help bring the product closer to market, as well a substantial satellite data quota worth €10,000 made available by the European Commission.
The winner will also get the opportunity to partner with Astrosat in further developing its service to sell to select existing end user clients.
THECRITERIA
Entrants will be expected to have identified a novel or interesting new earth observation service that would benefit from bespoke sensors on the ISS; to have defined the type of sensor(s) needed to deliver their service; and to have presented a solid business case.
The PARTNER
This challenge has been set by Astrosat in association with Teledyne Brown. Astrosat is a private sector managed earth observation company based in Edinburgh, Scotland, that focuses on commercial development and exploitation of EO data. Its clients are spread internationally from South East Asia to Central America and consume products as diverse as deforestation monitoring to energy efficiency in the urban environment.
by Peter B. de Selding — July 6, 2016. PARIS – SI Imaging Services (SIIS) of South Korea on July 6 said it had begun commercial sales of imagery from its Kompsat-3A optical Earth observation satellite, making Korea the second nation, after the United States, to put 50-centimeter-class pictures on the open market.
In a statement, SIIS said Kompsat-3A, launched in March 2015, offers imagery with a ground sampling distance of less than 50 centimeters, making it the sharpest imagery available commercially with the exception of DigitalGlobe of the United States.
Westminster, Colorado-based DigitalGlobe now distributes commercial imagery with a resolution as sharp as 30 centimeters. Its WorldView-4 satellite, scheduled for launch later this year, is capable of producing 25-centimeter imagery.
DigitalGlobe and other companies selling satellite imagery commercially say resolution is not the Alpha and Omega of a successful geospatial-imagery business. Speed of delivery to users, revisit time, the quality of the imagery library and multiple other factors are just as important, depending on the type of customers.
Nonetheless, these companies generally agree the high-resolution end of the market is where demand is increasing most rapidly, and where the business is most profitable.
“The race to higher resolution still exists,” said Eric Morel, director of Airbus Defence and Space Geo-Information’s optical intelligence division. “Yes, revisit time is important, and yes, image freshness is important and we are certainly working to improve that. But the fact is that the race to higher resolution is still here,” Morel said June 29 at the Toulouse Space Show conference.
Airbus shares, with the French Defense Ministry, the use of the two Pleiades optical satellites, both of which are in orbit. Operating from a 694-kilometer polar low Earth orbit, Pleiades satellites produce “native,” or untreated, imagery with a 70-centimeter resolution. Airbus sells resampled imagery, which involves laying one image over another to achieve an apparently sharper picture, at 50 centimeters in resolution.
Imagery specialists say resampling does not change the size of each pixel. But Airbus says many of its customers like it.
Kompsat-3A’s imaging assembly was built with assistance from Airbus Defence and Space’s German division and from the German Aerospace Center, DLR. For the global market, Airbus France is in charge of the optical images, with Airbus Germany providing Germany’s radar satellites.
Kompsat-3A carries the same basic imager as the Kompsat-3 satellite launched in 2012. But Kompsat-3A operates from 528 kilometers, whereas Kompsat-3 is in a 675-kilometer orbit. Being closer to the Earth, Kompsat-3A can offer what SIIS says is “better than 50 centimeters” images, compared to 70-centimeter-resolution products from Kompsat-3. The satellite produces images with a 12-kilometer-diameter swath. Color imagery is taken with a 2.2-meter resolution. The satellite’s infrared sensor can image at 5.5 meters.
The Korean Aerospace Research Institute had billed Kompsat-3A as having a 55-centimeter resolution for black-and-white images when pointing straight down.
SIIS did not immediately respond to questions of whether the sub-50-centimeter claim was a result of image resampling or an update of Kompsat-3A’s capabilities after a year of in-orbit testing.
Israel Aircraft Industries has sold an Optsat 3000 optical Earth observation satellite to the Italian Defense Ministry as part of a trade involving Italian jet trainer aircraft. The satellite has a 38-centimeter resolution from a 450-kilometer orbit, with an 11-kilometer swath, and weighs 380 kilograms. The Italian government has signaled no intent to commercialize the imagery.
IAI has said is own ImageSat International commercial Earth observation company is readying a 30-centimeter-class satellite, which is scheduled to be launched by the end of the decade.