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A new way of studying and visualizing Earth science data from a NASA and U.S. Geological Survey satellite program is resulting in, for the first time, the ability to tease out the small events that can cause big changes in an ecosystem.


This imagery covers lands managed by the U.S. Forest Service in Washington state, Oregon and northern California. Credit: Goddard’s Scientific Visualization Studio.

Called LandTrendr, this computer program is able to find patterns previously buried within vast amounts of scientific data. Still in development, it’s already led to seeing for the first time in satellite imagery an obscured, slow-moving decline and recovery of trees in Pacific Northwest forests.

Comparing satellite data to ground data, scientists uncovered the cause. “It was, as it turns out, bugs,” says Robert Kennedy, a remote sensing specialist at Boston University, who consulted with U.S. Forest Service experts to confirm his observations.

The unexpected disturbance pattern showed a long slow decline of tree health over years followed by slow regrowth. It emerged in several areas, particularly near Mount Hood in the 1980s, peaking in 1992 when regrowth began, and near Mount Rainier where the insect outbreak lasted ten years from its onset in 1994 till the insects killed all the trees and moved on in 2004.

Kennedy created the LandTrendr program specifically to work with data from the NASA and U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Landsat program. Kennedy’s new way of viewing Landsat imagery has already changed how the Forest Service in the Pacific Northwest operates its yearly forest monitoring program that uses ground stations, satellite imagery and statistics to evaluate current conditions.

Kennedy says that LandTrendr works because of the unique nature of Landsat data. The data embedded in images are a scientific record of the Earth’s surface that goes back 40 years.

Each image, or scene, covers an area 115 miles by 112 miles (185 kilometers by 180 kilometers) and provides data for wavelengths of light reflected or emitted from the Earth’s surface, which scientists use to see, for example, forest conditions not apparent in visible light. With the four-decade record, they can compare images between years and see how the land changes with time.

Studying big areas over many years means handling big data sets and figuring out how to get all the data to work together for meaningful comparisons. One challenge in particular is finding images from the same time of year where the view of the ground is not hidden by clouds.

Kennedy’s breakthrough was to combine cloud-free pixels from multiple scenes of the same area collected over the growing season in late summer. Then he compares the new images for each year to one another. By breaking a scene down into smaller sized pixels, the cloud-covered portions could be tossed away, but LandTrendr keeps the clean bits to reveal the life history of each pixel.

“We’re getting better data use out of what people think of as crummier images,” says Curtis Woodcock, a remote sensing specialist at Boston University who employs a similar method to Kennedy to build an image of the landscape out of Landsat data pixel by pixel.

What makes all this possible are two things: Computers are finally powerful enough to process vast amounts of data, and Landsat data is now available free of charge.

The Oregon Data Trail
The Landsat program has been observing Earth’s land surfaces consistently since 1972, when the first Landsat satellite, what became known as Landsat 1, went into orbit.

Since then, it has compiled the longest continuous satellite record of change across our planet. But a left over pay-for-data policy from the commercialization of the program in the 1980s and 90s meant scientists rarely looked at the year-by-year evolution of a landscape. When the USGS began providing Landsat data for no charge in 2008, looking at twenty-five years or more of data became affordable as long as you had the computing power to handle it.

“Not that long ago the size of an individual Landsat scene would have crippled most desk top computers,” says Doug Morton, a physical scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt Md., who uses Landsat to study changes in the Amazon and forests in Indonesia. Now with processing power doubled or more, he says, it’s no problem for most desktop machines to handle a big scientific job.

When Kennedy first saw a yearly succession of moderate resolution Landsat satellite images of a 13,000 square mile area near Portland, Ore., it was a revelation. Says Kennedy, it was like looking at a pair of air photos of a forested hillside offset so that with special glasses, the image pops into three dimensional clarity.

“You sort of squint your eyes and it takes a while and all of a sudden you get that moment — boom! Oh, my god, it’s a landscape!” he says. “I had that same sense [of amazement ] when I first started looking at the time series stuff.”

The ability to scroll backward and forward through time and Kennedy’s new technique for creating single visualizations out of millions of bits of data from hundreds of Landsat images has revealed not just the patchwork of fire scars and clear cuts — what he was originally looking for when he partnered with the Forest Service — but also the slow and subtle changes that take place over many years, including pulses of insect outbreaks.

“We did not expect that,” says Kennedy. In the satellite imagery they had found two kinds of insect signals. The first is a classic mountain pine beetle outbreak. One near the Three Sisters volcanoes in Oregon started in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The beetles attacked lodge pole pines, the same species affected in outbreaks throughout British Columbia and Colorado.

The second, subtler signal found near Mount Hood and Mount Rainier is the western spruce budworm, an insect that moves into an area and eats the needles off the trees. Losing its green growth doesn’t necessarily kill the tree, but it does put it under a lot of stress. If budworms return in following years, trees will ultimately succumb to the onslaught and die. Then the budworms, out of food, move on. And the forest gradually recovers.

Kennedy says to confirm the satellite data, they hiked into areas with recent known budworm outbreaks near Mount Rainier. With the decline and regrowth patterns from the new maps in hand, Kennedy says, “we stand out on the ground in the forest and look at all the dead trees and we realize that we’re actually starting to see something that we had never been able to see before from space. It was very exciting.”

The imagery produced by LandTrendr is a remarkable tool for looking at change over time, says Woodcock. But what he really wants to see is a move from the retrospective to the real time. He says, “The goal in the long run is to be able to provide land managers information on what’s happening as it’s happening.” It’s a process, he says, that’s just getting started.

“That ability to read the story of the landscape is something that the Landsat archive allows us to do like none other,” says Doug Morton of NASA Goddard. NASA and the USGS will continue providing the means to see it with the next satellite in the Landsat series, to be called Landsat 8, scheduled to launch in early 2013.

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(Dec2012) On 12 December 2012, EUMETSAT’s MSG-3 satellite was declared ready to support the Meteosat operational services and renamed Meteosat-10. On 18 December, the dissemination of Meteosat-10 SEVIRI data and meteorological products has started to the wider user community via EUMETCast-Europe.

This is in addition to the National Meteorological Services in EUMETSAT’s Member and Cooperating States and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), which have been receiving SEVIRI data and products since October. For EUMETCast users in Africa, a user station upgrade is being prepared which will be deployed over the coming weeks, ensuring Meteosat-10 data availability to users in Africa from January.

In the next two months, Meteosat-10 and Meteosat-9 will deliver full Earth scan image and meteorological products in parallel, with Meteosat-10 scheduled to become the prime operational satellite on 21 January after moving to 0º. Parallel dissemination will allow users to prepare themselves before Meteosat-10 takes over.

MSG is a joint programme undertaken by ESA and EUMETSAT. ESA is responsible for the development of satellites fulfilling user and system requirements defined by EUMETSAT and of the procurement of recurrent satellites on its behalf. Following the satellite separation from the launch vehicle, ESA also performs the Launch and Early Orbit Phase operations required to place the spacecraft in geostationary orbit, before handing it over to EUMETSAT for commissioning and exploitation. EUMETSAT develops all ground systems required to deliver products and services to users and to respond to their evolving needs, procures launch services and operates the full system for the benefit of users.

Launched on 5 July, MSG-3 is the third in a series of four geostationary satellites introduced in 2002. These spin-stabilised satellites carry the primary Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infrared Imager, or SEVIRI. The prime contractor for the MSG satellites is Thales Alenia Space, with the SEVIRI instrument built by Astrium.

Source UN-Spider

(Dec2012) On 12 December 2012, EUMETSAT’s MSG-3 satellite was declared ready to support the Meteosat operational services and renamed Meteosat-10. On 18 December, the dissemination of Meteosat-10 SEVIRI data and meteorological products has started to the wider user community via EUMETCast-Europe.

This is in addition to the National Meteorological Services in EUMETSAT’s Member and Cooperating States and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), which have been receiving SEVIRI data and products since October. For EUMETCast users in Africa, a user station upgrade is being prepared which will be deployed over the coming weeks, ensuring Meteosat-10 data availability to users in Africa from January.

In the next two months, Meteosat-10 and Meteosat-9 will deliver full Earth scan image and meteorological products in parallel, with Meteosat-10 scheduled to become the prime operational satellite on 21 January after moving to 0º. Parallel dissemination will allow users to prepare themselves before Meteosat-10 takes over.

MSG is a joint programme undertaken by ESA and EUMETSAT. ESA is responsible for the development of satellites fulfilling user and system requirements defined by EUMETSAT and of the procurement of recurrent satellites on its behalf. Following the satellite separation from the launch vehicle, ESA also performs the Launch and Early Orbit Phase operations required to place the spacecraft in geostationary orbit, before handing it over to EUMETSAT for commissioning and exploitation. EUMETSAT develops all ground systems required to deliver products and services to users and to respond to their evolving needs, procures launch services and operates the full system for the benefit of users.

Launched on 5 July, MSG-3 is the third in a series of four geostationary satellites introduced in 2002. These spin-stabilised satellites carry the primary Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infrared Imager, or SEVIRI. The prime contractor for the MSG satellites is Thales Alenia Space, with the SEVIRI instrument built by Astrium.

Source UN-Spider

Reducing the rate of biodiversity loss and averting dangerous biodiversity change are international goals.

However, there is no global, harmonized observation system for delivering regular, timely data on biodiversity change. Partners from the Group on Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Network (GEO BON) are developing – and seeking consensus around – Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) that could form the basis of monitoring programs worldwide. Read Full Paper and consult the GEO BON EBVs page here

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The effects of climate change, population growth and economic development in the Mediterranean are posing a threat to the water supply in the region. As part of ESA’s TIGER initiative, satellite data are supporting water management by identifying water resources.

The demand for water is growing around the Mediterranean and is especially crucial in areas that do not receive regular rainfall. This is especially true for the southernmost parts of Europe and the countries lying along the African coast and in the eastern Mediterranean Basin.

Owing to the increasing population, the demand for water is growing for drinking and irrigation, representing 70–80% of the water use in the region. To get a better grip on water management, satellites are increasingly acknowledged as indispensable tools for collecting information on available water resources and their use. This information is also necessary for planning infrastructure, such as where to build a dam, how to divert a waterway or manage a flood event.

The ten-year TIGER initiative exploits Earth observation technologies in order to respond to the urgent need for reliable water information in Africa. TIGER is currently collaborating with the Euro-Mediterranean Information System on Know-How in the Water Sector (EMWIS), organising water observation systems and building capacity in the Mediterranean region.

Read more ESA

_Source UN-Spider

In a recent article in Nature, Peter J. Webster, professor of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, underlines the importance of regional weather forecasts to avoid losses of live and property.

Hurricane Sandy was not as fatal as it could have been, thanks to accurate and long-range meteorological data and satellite imagery. However, the state of affairs is different in many developing countries. “Although only 5% of tropical cyclones occur in the north Indian Ocean, they account for 95% of such casualties worldwide”, states Webster.

While developing countries are theoretically able to access data from global weather-forecast models, they face several obstacles: poor internet connections, low budgets and insufficient capacities to extract regional forecasts from them. The author states that global partnerships could serve as a bridge between the providers of such information and the user community.

In this field there has been significant progress, for example in Bangladesh. Forecasts, produced in Europe and processed in the United States are integrated into the regional disaster-management protocol by local experts. Thanks to the implementation of a hazard-forecasting system as well as effective planning and training, people can be evacuated in due time. Moreover, farmers are now able to take the necessary precautions to save their crops and livestock. Based on a World Bank report, Webster estimates that every dollar invested in this system enabled saving as much as $40.

Source UN-Spider

(Dec 2012) According to the 2012 World Disasters Report, recently released by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), over 72 million people are forcibly displaced due to a range of complex drivers including conflict and violence, disasters, political upheaval and even by large-scale development projects. An estimated 20 million among these migrants are living in a state of prolonged displacement.

The World Disasters Report is in its 20th issue and over the past two decades has covered topics such as ethics in aid, neglected crises, public health, HIV and AIDS and urban risk. This year’s World Disasters Report focuses on forced migration and on the people forcibly displaced by crises, violence, climate change and development projects, whose numbers are increasing each year.

The report includes reference to the value of satellite imagery analysis and mentions in Chapter 7 the work done by UNOSAT in the area of human security and emergency response. UNOSAT has become increasingly popular with the international community since 2000 especially because of its Humanitarian Rapid Mapping Service. In 2010 the UNOSAT team started a planned investment of over 1 million USD to expand its research and applications to the area of human security, including the monitoring of populations displaced by conflict and disasters. Since then UNOSAT has been active in a range of humanitarian and human rights instances upon request by UN agencies, Commissions of Enquiry and Panels of Experts established by the UN Secretary-General. In the case of the Syrian crisis for example, UNOSAT helps UNHCR monitor several camps in neighboring countries which have been sheltering Syrian citizens escaping the violence in their country.

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IncREO – Increasing Resilience through Earth Observation is a collaborative project under the call FP7-SPACE-2012-1 in support of emergency response management and risk-preparedness. The IncREO project will kick off at a meeting scheduled at EC/REA in Brussels, Belgium, from 23 to 24 January 2013. The event is closed to the public.

The overall objective of IncREO is to provide actors responsible for disaster management, risk prevention, civil protection and also spatial planning with EO-based solutions contributing particularly to an improved preparedness and mitigation planning for areas highly vulnerable to natural disasters and already noticeable climate change trends. These solutions will be adjusted to the users’ and end-users’ needs and will also reflect on short-term climate change scenarios and related legislature – at the national, supranational and European level. As a multi-risk oriented concept, “per se” all types of natural disasters are addressed. However, selected use cases (dam failure, storm surge and wave height, flood, earthquake and landslide) and the transfer of solutions to a specifically multi-risk prone test site will also be covered. From a technical point of view, the IncREO solutions will be based on state-of-the-art methodologies, implemented by means of up-to-date mapping and modelling/procedures and, finally, appropriately disseminated to the relevant stakeholder groups.

The UNESCO Regional Bureau for Science and Culture in Europe, Venice (Italy), will support public awareness in natural risk-preparedness, in particular floods and geo-hazards. The UNESCO Venice Office will be responsible for the interface of the scientific partners of the project with the end-users community; in particular, the Civil Protection Department of the Veneto Region – according to the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for co-operation activities signed, and the Albanian Ministry of Interior Affairs (Civil Protection Department) as project demonstrators. The Office will provide its consortiated partners with an unprecedented highly-defined satellite-based map to improve the identification capacity of territorial vulnerabilities in order to increase the resilience of communities and nations to natural disasters.

Besides UNESCO, the official partners of IncREO are: Spot Image S.A. SISA (France), Geomer GmbH. (Germany), GeoVille Informationssysteme und Datenverarbeitung GmbH. (Austria); University of Twente (Netherlands), National Institute of Meteorology and Hydrology NIMH of Bulgarian Academy of Sciences BAS (Bulgaria); Météo-France (France); Romanian Space Agency ROSA (Romania); and, Infoterra GmbH Ltd (Germany).

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(December) The fourth edition of the Charter Newsletter is now available

The International Charter “Space and Major Disasters” published the fourth issue of their newsletter. The publication is available online on the Charter’s website and covers the following topics:

  • CNES takes over chairmanship of International Charter (incl. an article from the CNES Ethics Adviser)
  • The International Charter promotes Universal Access
  • JAXA leadership for the Charter from April to October 2012
  • Landsat 5 (end of service)
  • Pleiades 1b satellite successfully launched
  • Training Course on International Charter at ESA’s ESRIN facility with Chinese delegates
  • USGS PM Training Course in Russia

Read more at Charter December Newsletter