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The Fisheries minister, Mass Axi Gye, has disclosed that more than 200,000 Gambians are directly or indirectly employed by the nation’s fisheries sector.

Speaking recently at the launching of the regional fisheries project on Monitoring the Environment and Security in Africa (MESA), Gye acknowledged that fish as a significant protein; its benefits are threatened as a result of poor management practices and the ever increasing challenges from the Illegal Unregulated and Unreported (IUU) fishing practices. He added that the main challenges to fisheries resources in the world today, are due to inadequate or lack of requisite information and data.

The MESA project, he explained, seeks to increase the information management, decision-making and planning capacity of African continent, regional and national institutions mandated for environment, climate, food security and related responsibilities, by enhancing access to and exploitation of relevant earth observation applications in Africa.

The project is expected to be boosted by the use of technology such as the use of earth observation through satellites, he added. Minister Gye informed that an art observation using satellite technology is presently providing continued data for monitoring the environment and its resources.

The Fisheries minister described this ECOWAS project as the first of its kind launched by his Ministry.

He added: “The objective of this project is to increase the information management, decision-making and planning capacity of ECOWAS institutions responsible for the coastal and marine resource management by entrenched action through an exploitation of relevant earth observation data. This project came at a time when the government, under the leadership of President Jammeh, is making all the necessary efforts and working very hard to improving the management and the deployment of the fisheries resources with the aim of achieving the national policy objectives for the fisheries sector.

“As the minister responsible for fisheries, I am very much aware of the role that the fisheries contribute to our economy. Fisheries resources contribute significantly to the socio-cultural and economic wellbeing of the coastal communities in The Gambia”.

The Fisheries minister said the project is expected, among other things, to build the capacity of fisheries officers, scientists and key stakeholders and enable them to have better access to art observation, data and services related to managing the coastal and marine environment and its resources.

“It will also provide information on potential fishing zones map, monitoring and forecasting of the ocean conditions to ensure safety in any marine activities in the country. Therefore, the provision of the timely information on ocean surface waves and current can help prevent some of the negative impact that might be caused to the users of the marine and coastal environment. Another benefit of the project is to improve networking among institutions,” he noted.

The representative from the ECOWAS Commission, Samuel Medu at the launching, congratulated The Gambia government for launching this new project, which he said, was first proposed through the Ouagadougou Declaration, signed in September 2010 by the African Union Commission, the ACP Secretariat and the African Regional Economic Communities. The Declaration, he said, aims to ensure continuity of past investments on the use of earth observation data in Africa.

The project duration, he said, is 36 months and that at the end, five major outcomes are expected.

The director, Administration and Finance at the National Environment Agency (NEA), Muhammed Denton, recalled when the MESA was first initiated by ECOWAS with a slogan: ‘Water management for Agricultural and Pastoral Land.’ He underscored that the importance of earth observation to monitor the environment is overwhelmingly taking into consideration.

The permanent secretary, Ministry of Fisheries, Dr. Bamba Banja, who chaired the meeting, called for knowledge sharing with a view to making the project sustainable and vibrant.

Author: Bekai Njie & Fatou Gassama
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A 13-year decline in vegetation in the eastern and southeastern Amazon has been linked to a decade-long rainfall decline in the region, a new NASA-funded study finds.

With global climate models projecting further drying over the Amazon in the future, the potential loss of vegetation and the associated loss of carbon storage may speed up global climate change.

The study was based on a new way to measure the “greenness” of plants and trees using satellites. While one NASA satellite measured up to 25 percent decline in rainfall across two thirds of the Amazon from 2000 to 2012, a set of different satellite instruments observed a 0.8 percent decline in greenness over the Amazon. The study was published on Nov. 11 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

While the decline of green vegetation was small, the area affected was not: 2.1 million square miles (5.4 million square kilometers), equivalent to over half the area of the continental United States. The Amazon’s tropical forests are one of the largest sinks for atmospheric carbon dioxide on the planet.

“In other words, if greenness declines, this is an indication that less carbon will be removed from the atmosphere. The carbon storage of the Amazon basin is huge, and losing the ability to take up as much carbon could have global implications for climate change,” said lead author Thomas Hilker, remote sensing specialist at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Oregon.

Plants absorb carbon dioxide as part of photosynthesis, the process by which green plants harvest sunlight. The healthier the plants, the greener the forest.

The Amazon basin stores an estimated 120 billion tons of Earth’s carbon – that’s about 3 times more carbon than humans release into the atmosphere each year. If vegetation becomes less green, it would absorb less of that carbon dioxide. As a result, more of human emissions would remain in the atmosphere, increasing the greenhouse effect that contributes to global warming and alters Earth’s climate.

Can’t See the Forest for the Clouds

Teasing out changes in vegetation greenness over the Amazon is one of the most challenging problems for satellite remote sensors because there’s no tougher place on Earth to observe the surface.

“The wet season has typically 85 to over 95 percent cloudiness from late morning to early afternoon, when NASA satellites make measurements,” said co-author and remote sensing specialist Alexei Lyapustin of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “Even during the dry season the average cloudiness can be on the order of 50 to 70 percent.”

Add other atmospheric effects, soot and other particles released from fires during the dryer months, and it’s very difficult for the satellite to pick up a clear signal of the surface, Lyapustin added.

Using the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, or MODIS, instruments aboard NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites, Hilker, Lyapustin and their colleagues developed a new method to detect and remove clouds and other sources of error in the data.

It looks at the same location on Earth’s surface day after day over time and analysts pick out a pattern that is stable in contrast to the ever-changing clouds and aerosols. This knowledge of what the surface should look like from earlier observations is used later to detect and remove the atmospheric noise caused by clouds and aerosols.

It’s as if the signal from the ground were a song on a static-y radio station, and by listening to it over and over again for long enough, the new method detects and removes the static. By reducing those errors, they increased the accuracy of the greenness measurements over the Amazon.

“We’re much more confident that this is a gap between clouds where we can measure greenness, but standard algorithms would call it a cloud,” said Lyapustin. “We can get more data about the surface, and we can start seeing more subtle changes.”

One of the subtle changes visible in the new data-set is how the Amazon’s greenness corresponds to one of the long-known causes of rainfall or drought to the Amazon basin: changes in sea surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific Ocean, called the El Nino Southern Oscillation. During warmer and dryer El Nino years, the Amazon appears browner. During cooler La Nina wet years, the Amazon appears greener.

In the past, with greenness data, “it’s been hard to tell an El Nino year from a non-El Nino year,” said Lyapustin.

The effects of large and more frequent droughts may have lasting impacts that contribute to the long-term decline in vegetation, especially in an increasingly water stressed ecosystem. Many climate models project that in the future, El Nino and La Nina events will become more intense. They also project a northward shift of the main rain belt that provides moisture to the Amazon rainforest, which could further reduce rainfall to the region.

“Our observations are too short to link drying to human causes,” Hilker said. “But if, as global circulation models suggest, drying continues, our results provide evidence that this could degrade the Amazonian forest canopies, which would have cascading effects on global carbon and climate dynamics.”

Limits of Light vs. Water

The researchers found another subtlety in the Amazon’s response to rainfall, which has led to new insights on a question under debate: Are seasonal changes in plant growth more limited by lack of sunlight or lack of water?

The Amazon basin, which consists of grasslands, evergreen forest, and deciduous forest where trees lose their leaves annually, has a wet season and a dry season. Past measurements from satellites have shown either no changes in greening between seasons or increased greening through the end of the dry season, attributed to fewer clouds blocking sunlight from reaching the ground.

Measurements from a handful of field stations across the basin, however, indicated the vegetation greenness due to increased sunlight in the dry season would decline once the water in the soils was used up – especially in drought years.

“Our study has helped confirm field-based results across large areas from space,” Hilker said. “With our work, we have shown that there is a dry season greening but that under extended drought we get a decline in vegetation greenness.”

During the dry season of an average year, the evergreen plants tap into groundwater, bask in the sunlight, and become greener.

“They’re deeply rooted so they have plenty of water and they have lots of leaves,” said Compton Tucker, a senior research scientist at Goddard who also contributed to the paper.

“However, when you come up to one of these really dry periods, [like the drought of 2005 or 2010], then there isn’t enough water to take advantage of all the light during the dry season.” Water becomes the limiting factor whose effects can carry over from one year into the next if trees and vegetation die off.

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Typhoon Hagupit soaked the Philippines, and a NASA rainfall analysis indicated the storm dropped almost 19 inches in some areas. After Hagupit departed the Philippines as a tropical storm, NASA’s Terra satellite passed over and captured a picture of the storm curled up like a cat waiting to pounce when it landfalls in Vietnam on Dec. 11.

The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission or TRMM satellite, managed by NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency gathered over a week of rainfall data on Hagupit. That rainfall data along with data from other satellites was compiled into an analysis to determine how much rain fell over various areas of the Philippines and surrounding areas.

On Dec. 8, the TRMM team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland performed a preliminary rainfall analysis and updated it on Dec. 9. The analysis of rainfall from Dec. 1-9, 2014) showed rainfall totals of over 450 mm (17.5 inches) in a few areas in the eastern Philippines near where Hagupit came ashore. Even greater rainfall totals of over 477 mm (18.7 inches) were analyzed over the open waters of the Philippine Sea east of Manila.

Manila received moderate to heavy rainfall but avoided extremely heavy precipitation as Hagupit (Ruby) moved past to the south of the capital. Rainfall amounts of over 200mm (almost 8 inches) were prevalent from southern Luzon through eastern Samar.

On Dec. 10 at 03:10 UTC (Dec. 9 at 10:10 p.m. EST), NASA’s Terra satellite captured a view of Tropical Storm Hagupit in the South China Sea. In the visible image, Hagupit appeared to be curled up as thunderstorms surrounded the center, and extended in a wide band to the northeast of the center. Hagupit’s center was almost in the middle of the South China Sea between the Philippines to the east and Vietnam to the west.

At 1500 UTC (10 a.m. EST), Hagupit’s maximum sustained winds remained at 40 knots (46 mph/74 kph), the same strength they were on Dec. 9. Hagupit was centered near 13.6 north longitude and 114.7 east latitude, or about 533 nautical miles (613.4 miles/987.1 km) east-northeast of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The storm was moving to the west at 9 knots (10.3 mph/16.6 kph).

Hagupit is now predicted by the Joint Typhoon Warning Center to continue weakening and make landfall in southern Vietnam mid-day Dec. 11 (EST) or just after midnight local time in Vietnam. A Severe Tropical Storm Warning is currently in effect for southern Vietnam.

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From a recent and dramatic image showing development at the edge of New Zealand’s Mount Egmont National Park to the weaving, interconnected waterways of the Sundarbans in Bangladesh to the stunningly unique beauty of the Namib desert in Namibia, Sanctuary: Exploring the World’s Protected Areas from Space, captures a new perspective on some of the world’s most interesting, changing, and threatened places.

NASA Administrator, Charles Bolden, writes in the Foreword, “I—as a former astronaut who has looked upon our beautiful planet from space—hope that we can advance the use of space-based remote sensing and other geospatial tools to study, understand, and improve the management of the world’s parks and protected areas as well as the precious biodiversity that thrives within their borders.” Sanctuary advances readers one more step towards that vision.

Uniting satellite imagery with nature photography, conservation stories, and quotes from some of today’s leading park executives and conservationists, the book illuminates the contributions of remote sensing towards addressing the many of the themes of the World Parks Congress. These themes include reaching conservation goals, responding to climate change, improving health and well-being, supporting human life, reconciling development challenges, enhancing diversity and quality of governance, respecting indigenous and traditional knowledge and culture, and inspiring a new generation.

Published to commemorate the IUCN World Parks Congress—an event that takes place only every 10 years— the book is a celebration of global conservation efforts. Author Nancy Colleton, president of the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies and deputy chair of the IUCN Commission on Education and Communication, states, “As much as this book is intended showcase space-based satellite imagery and its role in conservation, we also wanted to tell the down-to-Earth stories of what’s happening in these areas.”

One such story is the growing trend of connecting areas to protect migrating species such as the pronghorn, which migrates the longest distance of any terrestrial animal in the United States—more than 350 miles.

Jonathan B. Jarvis, director of the U.S. National Park Service states in the book “For the first time in my nearly 40 years of work in the National Park Service, the four U.S. land management agencies are working together, applying the newest geospatial technologies to identify and protect critical corridors of connectivity between protected areas.”

Another story describes the work of the Amazon Conservation Team, which collaborates with indigenous communities to create maps of their territories and in another area develops protective measures to help preserve the rights of isolated tribes.

Published by the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies with support from NASA, Sanctuary: Exploring the World’s Protected Areas from Space is available to be downloaded at www.strategies.org. Imagery and content from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Goddard Space Flight Center, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), DigitalGlobe Corporation, European Space Agency, IUCN, the Amazon Conservation Team, Conservation International, World Wildlife Fund, The Wild Team, Rare, the American Prairie Reserve and other entities is featured.

Download Sanctuary PDF Here

Established in the framework of the FP7-REGPOT-2012-2013-1 Coordination and Support Actions – Theme Area “4.1 Unlocking and developing the research potential of research entities established in the EU ́s Convergence regions and Outermost regions”, the BEYOND project (EC GA No 316210) aims at maintaining and expanding the existing state-of-the-art interdisciplinary research potential, by Building a Centre of Excellence for Earth Observation based monitoring of Natural Disasters in South-Eastern Europe.

We feel like it has been a success in BEYOND because our work makes people’s lives a little better, and more safe, and as such it was recognised in the Copernicus Masters Awards Competition of this year, where the FIREHUB tool won the Best Challenge Service prize of 2014. The FIREHUB service provides unique real time information about the status of the active fires and the spread of fires and fire plumes over the ground.
And there is where satellite and IT technologies comes to be of great help. The unique feature of the FIREHUB service is the full exploitation of the very high temporal resolution of the METEOSAT satellites acquiring images every 5 minutes from the entire globe. Through complex modelling, FIREHUB engine combines the satellite observations with additional evidences of fire occurrence, weather forecasts, fuel, and landscape data, in order to derive and disseminate on a 5 minute basis reliable pictures of the active fires with an enhanced spatial resolution of up to 500 meters on the ground, that is 50 times better than the spatial resolution of the raw satellite observations (note that the MSG SEVIRI sensor resolution is ~3.5km over the SE Europe). Along with the fire evolution, FIREHUB provides hourly forecasts of the 3-dimensional smoke field with organic carbon concentration spreads in the atmosphere. Finally relying on any available satellite data of high or very high spatial resolution, including the future Sentinel- 2 data, the FIREHUB tool is designed to deliver daily, weekly, and seasonal burned area maps by invoking a fully automatic production chain. For more information visit: http://ocean.space.noa.gr/FireHub

bq. BEYOND_Newsletter_electronic_No_III.pdf

By MARIA SHEAHAN, Reuters

FRANKFURT – A European satellite beamed images to earth using new laser-based communications technology on Friday, opening the way for uninterrupted and near instantaneous viewing of natural disasters being sent to governments and relief agencies.

The images were a test of a 450 million euro ($562 million) space data highway being constructed. Called European Data Relay Satellite (EDRS), it will allow faster and more secure transmission of large amounts of data, such as pictures and radar images, to and from earth.

It is seen as particularly useful for monitoring flood and earthquake damage in real time.

“Currently, a satellite downloads the data that it acquires whenever it is within view of one of four ground stations on earth,” Josef Aschbacher, head of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Earth Observation Program Planning & Coordination Service, told Reuters ahead of Friday’s transmission.

“That means there can be periods of 45 to 90 minutes from the visibility of one station to another,” he said.

Once completed, EDRS will do away with such blind spots by using two satellites – to be launched in 2015 and 2016 and equipped with laser technology – to send data to and from Earth or between satellites at a rate of 1.8 Gigabits per second.

That is about equivalent to sending all the data that could be printed in a one-meter long shelf of books in one second, according to generally accepted industry measures.

EDRS will also offer encryption for more secure transmissions, and will make Europe less dependent on ground stations abroad to access satellite data.

In Friday’s transmission, a satellite launched as part of Europe’s Copernicus project in April, Sentinel-1a, sent images across a distance of 36,000 kms (22,369 miles) to Inmarsat’s communications satellite Alphasat, which relayed the signal to earth.

The demonstration of the new technology is key to getting the European Commission’s go-ahead for the space agency to sign an agreement making Airbus unit Astrium the operator of EDRS ahead of a Dec. 22 deadline.

EDRS will later relay data on sea ice, oil spills or floods from the multi-billion euro Copernicus earth observation project, but its services will also be available to other paying customers. — Reuters

(November 2014) China will launch a new “constellation” of marine surveillance satellites in 2019 to monitor ships, oil rigs, marine disasters and land-based resources.

According to Lin Mingsen, deputy director with the National Satellite Ocean Application Service, the HY-3 “constellation” will include a series of satellites that will use synthetic aperture radar technology, “capable of operating day or night… and in all weather conditions.” The satellites will be able see meter-long objects from space and generate high-definition imagery of both land and ocean surfaces, Lin said. He said the satellites would be used to monitor ships and drilling platforms, in addition to marine oil spills, sea ice, ocean waves and surface winds among other features.

“They will play an important role in reinforcing China’s marine rights protection, marine law enforcement and supervision, management of its offshore waters and marine disaster relief and reduction,” Lin said.

Source: Xinhuanet

(Nov 2014) A satellite system comprising active and passive microwave remote sensors enables synchronous accurate acquisition of key elements in the Earth’s water cycle.

The global water cycle is the continuous transformation and movement of water on, above, and below the surface of the Earth through the phases of liquid, solid (ice and snow), and gas (vapor). It is the most active and important of the planet’s cycles, defining Earth’s mass, energy transportation, and transitions, and is influenced by factors such as global climate and human activity. To measure the effects of these transformations, scientists examine spatial distribution and temporal variations in images of cycle processes. However, such studies are currently limited by shortfalls in knowledge and observational capabilities. Existing systems offer satellite monitoring of the cycle, but the images they produce would benefit from improved temporal resolution, for example.

Here, we present an integrated satellite-based observation system for the key elements and corresponding processes of the global water cycle. Our approach enhances observing and retrieval capabilities, to improve Earth science and global change studies. The proposed system, the Water Cycle Observation Mission (WCOM; see Figure 1), monitors soil moisture, ocean salinity, snow water equivalent, soil freeze-thaw processes, atmospheric water vapor, and precipitation. Moreover, its optimized payload configuration and design enable the mission to provide observations of all the environmental parameters—dominant and auxiliary—required for accurate retrieval of water cycle information. We can use the resulting datasets to refine the long-term satellite observations made during recent decades, and to monitor changes in hydrological elements.

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Each and every aerial survey company is constantly put under pressure by both its customers and competitors to downsize the costs of survey projects.

At the first stage of an aerial survey project, in collecting the data, it is the flying time that costs money. The costs are determined for example by the size of the area to be surveyed, the number of flight lines needed to cover the area, and good enough light and weather conditions allowing flying.

Another stage of the remote sensing project where the cost-effectiveness is critical is the data processing. Because of huge amount of indirect mapping methods and manual work needed in data classification, that stage can constitute up to 70 % of costs of an aerial survey project, and therefore huge savings can be achieved.

Increasing automation of data classification

Is it possible to integrate hyperspectral data with LiDAR point cloud and increase automation of data classification? Sean Anklam, the President at Exogenesis, the provider of big geospatial data says yes, it is possible. And by doing that, it is possible to decrease the cost of data processing. Sean Anklam, a specialist in integrating and synthesizing big geospatial data at Exogenesis, and additionally National Intelligence Council Adviser for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, is not questioning the significance of LiDAR and hyperspectral data fusion.

“I think it’s the Holy Grail of remote sensing. The two different disciplines of remote sensing complement one another so well and each fill a critical information shortfall. LiDAR provides you with intensity information and height and volume and texture whereas hyperspectral provides you with material composition, chemical composition and you are then fully able to describe an object, whether it’s a tree or a house or a road in terms of what is made of and its actual size. You can describe a tree’s canopy structure, height, stem spacing, leaf size, types of leaves, tree health etc.“

Sean has created an algorithm that transforms and fuses both datasets into a frequency and then performs an inverse transformation to produce polysynthetic dataset, the truly fused HSI & LiDAR point cloud, where each point has a chemical signature associated with it. “This is probably the most powerful way to express those dual capabilities because it enables you to do stream processing classifying things like tree types, fire fuels for forest fire modeling etc”, he says. “Within the oil and gas industry it has tremendous value for not only mapping oil and gas infrastructure, but detecting spills and leaks and other signs of aging in the infrastructure.”

Currently, the manual classification of LiDAR point cloud using RGBi imagery can take up to 70 % of the total aerial survey project cost just. “The way that expense gets diminished is through the hyperspectral-LiDAR fusion process where the new dataset enables a whole battery of automated stream processing tools.”

For forest tree species classification Exogenesis has created a tool called Random Forest. It generates the automated decision entry classifiers to ride across the LiDAR and hyperspectral data in concert with one another, and it produces tremendously accurate results. According to Sean the cost of data processing can be halved by using data fusion.

Decreasing the number of flight lines

Before the data can be processed, it needs to be collected. The most important condition that has to be met in order to fuse the two different data sets afterwards is that the both sensor technologies must be in the same platform; aircraft, helicopter or UAV. Both of those data sets need to be georeferenced and it is cheapest to do if both of those sensors share the same GNSS/IMU.

Flying is expensive and aerial survey data collection costs typically 1000-2000 Euros an hour. Sometimes bad weather can keep the aircraft on the ground for days. When it finally can fly, the number of flight hours needed is determined by the size of the area to be surveyed and the number of flight lines needed to cover the area. Often the surveyed areas are large and therefore the possibility to reduce the number strips is crucial in cutting the costs. “The addition of LiDAR to a hyperspectral collection dramatically reduces errors caused by shadows and topographic distortion thereby requiring fewer flight lines to be collected”, Sean says.

The full spectrum hyperspectral sensors usually have 384 spatial pixels, and that is the case for example with SPECIM’s AisaFENIX. To be able to cut the costs of flying even more by reducing the number of flight lines, and at the same time retaining the pixel size, the hyperspectral sensor should have significantly more spatial pixels. By using SPECIM’s new full spectrum imager, AisaFENIX 1K, which does have 1024 spatial pixels, the number of flight lines can be reduced by 60 %. For example, if previously 15 hours of flying was needed to cover a specific survey area, with AisaFENIX it can be covered in 6 hours.

“In addition to the cost reduction, by combining hyperspectral imaging with LiDAR surveying it is possible for survey providers to create entirely new data applications and therefore new business”, Sean points out.

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© Spacenews (By Peter B. de Selding | Oct. 9, 2014-UPDATED Oct. 13 at 12:38 p.m. EDT)

BRUSSELS — The European Commission, confirming satellite industry fears, has decided to allow terrestrial broadband operators to use a portion of C-band spectrum that had been reserved exclusively for satellite use, a senior commission official said Oct. 9.

The decision is likely to tip the position of the broader grouping that represents European governments at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) as it prepares for the upcoming World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC) in late 2015.

More immediately, the decision is all but certain to affect the outcome of a WRC preconference of more than 100 governments scheduled for Oct. 20-Nov. 7 in Busan, South Korea, which will set the agenda for WRC-15. It now appears likely that the C-band issue will be placed on that agenda.

One satellite industry official said the decision, which was first articulated in 2008, should be viewed in a positive light insofar as the commission is also committing to preserving an adjacent block of C-band spectrum for satellite use. That upper portion of C-band spectrum also is coveted by terrestrial broadband operators.

Yet to be determined is how the European representatives will present their decision to their counterparts in Latin America, Africa and Asia, where the use of C-band for essential telecommunications services and television is widespread.

“Our worry is that whatever Europe says, other nations will take note of the fact that European governments think half the C-band downlink spectrum now allocated to satellites should be opened to terrestrial broadband despite efforts to demonstrate that it causes interference with the satellite signal,” said an official with one European satellite operator. “The terrestrial guys will use this to the maximum extent possible.”

Roberto Viola, deputy director general for the European Commission’s DG Connect division, said the commission’s decision to open up the lower part of the C-band spectrum, between 3.4 and 3.8 gigahertz, to terrestrial wireless operators might need “harmonization” to protect against interference.

But in an address to a conference on satellite frequency interference and spectrum allocation here organized by the French International Foreign Affairs Institute and the Secure World Foundation, Viola said the decision was final.

The upper half of the band, from 3.8 to 4.2 gigahertz, he said, would be protected as Europe prepares for the ITU’s Plenipotentiary Conference in Busan.

“We have fixed the so-called C-band problem,” Viola said. “It’s a good starting point for coexistence” between satellite and terrestrial networks.

In Europe, like in the United States, C-band satellite transmissions, while still widespread, are nowhere as prevalent in the overall telecommunications landscape as they are in Latin America, Africa and parts of Asia.

The commission “has no appetite” for removing the protections afforded to satellite transmissions in the upper part of the band, Viola said, “and we will make this clear at the upcoming radio conference.”

One of the difficulties the satellite industry has had in defending the C-band allocations against encroachment by more-powerful terrestrial transmissions is that so many C-band receive-only antennas in the developing world are not registered. Neither local nor international regulations required registration, meaning that satellite operators have been left to guess as to how many are in service.

Nigel Fry, head of distribution at the BBC World Service Group — which distributes programming over multiple terrestrial and satellite platforms — said less than 2 percent of the C-band receivers used by BBC’s audience are registered. The total number is estimated in the hundreds of thousands worldwide.

Fry said that, like the BBC, many European broadcasters and satellite fleet operators do substantial business outside Europe and will be affected by any move to invite terrestrial broadband into C-band.

Measures can be taken to compensate for fixed terrestrial services, Fry said, but allowing mobile broadband into C-band “will be disastrous” to the satellite links. “We can coexist with the fixed services, all it takes is some work. But sharing with [terrestrial] mobile is a bridge too far,” he said.

Various satellite-sector groups are now mobilizing for the Busan meeting and for the WRC-15 conference. Armed with studies purporting to show that terrestrial wireless does not use all the spectrum already allocated to it, and calling into question the spectrum-demand growth alleged by terrestrial wireless networks, satellite groups hope to hold the line on C-band encroachment.

Cecil Ameil, senior manager for European affairs at satellite fleet operator SES of Luxembourg, said the several hundred megahertz of contiguous C-band spectrum is a natural target for terrestrial wireless operators.

Proposals that C-band satellite customers outfit their antennas with filters to protect against terrestrial emissions will not work, Ameil said.

Each filter costs hundreds of dollars. Asking hundreds of thousands of consumers to purchase and install them is unrealistic, Ameil said.

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