Sunday 31 December 2017

2017 - a year in review

That is it for me in 2017 - another busy but very interesting year. 

One hurricane, two papers published, a big two day conference successfully hosted, joined a new COST action, helped propose a third, one new paper under review, two in prep, two national newspaper articles, two completed reports for OSi change detection project and accompanying modules, a SCSI research project completed.

Two pieces of big news coming in the new year; one relating to the NUIM MSc in GIS and Remote Sensing and another to my future prospects - a change of venue. 

Happy Christmas and New Year to all readers.

Wednesday 20 December 2017

Newgrange - #Solstice2017 Live Stream

2017 is the first year that the Winter Solstice in Newgrange is available to watch live online. Livestream is available here. No luck today - the 20th - as cloud has covered the whole area. Note: the weather lets you down for most time dependant events in Ireland, like meteor showers, BBQs, whale watching, fishing,camping, walking, hanging out the washing, etc. but you learn to not get your hopes up in Ireland, bring rain-gear and then be pleasantly surprised.

Yet I will try the last, I have another chance tomorrow (and if the 20th is a possible, then again the 22nd I'm assuming?). 

Character-building I suppose...

I saw a familiar archaeo-astronomer face being interviewed - Prof Frank Prendergast ex-DIT Head of School and also got an idea for a nice holiday trip, Boyne Boats, a guided tour paddling the Boyne in a Currach through Battle of the Boyne territory and other stone age regions..

Tuesday 19 December 2017

Christmas Gifts and Geo

Yes, they do exist!

I'm normally about 3 years ahead with Christmas presents and have boxes of them ready for emergencies but this year is a disaster. I have nothing bought for most people. Having said that I did come across two excellent Christmas gifts which are Geo related - one is a 3D print of lunar topography with an LED nitelight in the centre - different illumination settings - very cool.


The other is one for next year with a bit of luck.

LEGO allow people to submit ideas for a vote to see how popular it is. They also have subtle subliminal tricks to see how popular the model might be by asking "how many of these would you buy" and "how much would you be willing to pay"....Well one of the front runners is a LEGO model of a Galileo GNSS satellite. Very cool - i'll be buying about 50 of these. I actually followed through with this, registered AND voted for it - that is how serious I am...vote here



Friday 8 December 2017

Purgatorio de S. Patricio

A beautiful old map available here for browsing - billed as 'the largest early world map' in this post. 60 sheet maps digitised and joined into one. The mapmaker has an interesting outlook on Northern Ireland, must have been moonlighting as one of T. May's Phase 1 BREXIT negotiators.



Friday 1 December 2017

Drones and Birdstrike

Birdstrike is a major issue for airlines, it can cause serious damage to planes and even lead to loss of life. I have heard it suggested a number of times that drones could be a tool used to scare off birds near centres of aviation traffic. Link here for a nice video and an awesome looking drone from the NYTimes demonstrating just that.


Friday 17 November 2017

LiDAR, LasTools and Potree

Some people working with lastools and potree (I posted about potree earlier in the year) for navigating LiDAR point clouds of forestry. Nice looking stuff, i think their goal is VR - i feel like my hero, Ray Mears.

howto
potree viewer here


Thursday 9 November 2017

Irish Times - SCSI Property and Land supplement

I made a small contribution to the Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland (SCSI) Property and Land supplement in the Irish Times today. I was mostly fielding questions covering Copernicus data, the Copernicus Emergency Mapping Service and the new Earth Explorer FLEX mission due for launch in 2022.

Tuesday 7 November 2017

Calm after the storm

What a busy few days...we had a large turn-out at both events last week and a great selection of keynote speakers and presenters. There were really too many highlights for me to mention but one of the key take-aways for me is the new RUS system, a virtual machine/data storage/processing facility provided by Copernicus for the user community. They even provide free training and support! The move towards cloud processing is welcome (hardwae gets so old so quickly) and quite evident, looking at the TEPs, Google Earth Engine, now RUS.

It was announced at the close that IEOS2018 will be in Teagasc, thanks to everyone who helped this year and especially the industry sponsors who help keep the event free to attend.

Tuesday 31 October 2017

Registration Closed - IEOS2017/ Copernicus InfoSession

Registration is now closed for the IEOS and Copernicus InfoSession - although if there is anyone still interested we still have some spots free so come along on the day and register at the desk. We experienced high demand for the tickets - promises to be one of the best attended events yet!

Tuesday 24 October 2017

Counting the COST of Ophelia

Hurricane Ophelia hit Ireland last week. Although no longer a hurricane in name (it can't be one over cold waters) it was of hurricane force and did severe damage to many parts of the country resulting in loss fo life, complete closure of most public services and transport, fallen trees, coastal and inland flooding and power outages. Listening to Newstalk on the drive in this morning the insurance costs are expected to be in the billions. 

Baltimore Beacon - Photograph: Youen Jacob/Provision

Another cost of Ophelia was the cancellation of one of MY flights - the 18:15 scheduled for Brussels for the kick off meeting of a new COST action HARMONIOUS - "Harmonization of UAS techniques for agricultural and natural ecosystems monitoring". This COST action really caught my eye and has cross overs with a number of NCG projects including the RPAS Precision Ag stuff, the drainage using thermal cameras and RPAS, and the coastal bathymetry mapping using RPAS. These technologies are really in their infancy and there is no standard approach to data processing, either in the early stages of preprocessing or later on in data analysis. This is of interest to me from the OSi change detection project, where classification of high resolution imagery plays a major role. The SCSI RPAS WG can also benefit from the info on standardising results, plus the SCSI Rural Division I suspect.

Tuesday 10 October 2017

IEOS2017 and Copernicus Info Session - 2nd and 3rd November

Two great events coming up in the EO field, the annual Irish Earth Observation Symposium and the first Irish Copernicus Info Session. Maynooth hosted the IEOS in 2014 and it was a great success with over 150 people attending over both days. This year we've extended the second day to a full day and  are pushing for an even bigger attendance, we already have more than 150 registered with 3 weeks still to go. The Copernicus team are joining us on the second day to demonstrate the massive potential that their services and datasets promise for GI professionals and the wider user community. We will have exhibitors, keynote speakers from ESA, GEOS and the minister confirmed to open the event.

Abstract deadline for the IEOS is this Friday, 13th October. If you are interested in satellite, airborne, drone, terrestrial - multispectral, hyperspectral, SAR, thermal, orthoimagery - image classification, 3D models, monitoring  then this event is for you.

It is free to attend so get registering!




Wednesday 4 October 2017

Underwater Laser Scanning

Readers of this blog might remember my interest in the many excellent shipwreck 3D models downloadable from the GSI/MI/INFOMAR online dataviewers. I discovered a related article recently on very high resolution underwater laser scanning of wrecks being carried out with the help of the university of Southampton. Image of an old galley scanned as part of the project below..


Wow - look at that detail, and look at how well preserved it is despite being exposed! They say this model was created through photogrammetric methods - which is interesting in itself and one of the first underwater applications that I have come across, if you discount some of our bathymetry tests using the UAVs imagery.

Thanks to LiDARNEWS for tip off on the full story

Tuesday 26 September 2017

Largest Full-Disc Video of Earth

Some fantastic images from a Russian weather satellite in one week combined into a vid  - fascinating to watch the shadow coming around every day, plus the sun reflected in a whole ocean.



Thursday 21 September 2017

Ploughing / Swimming 2017

The first tent I came across at Ploughing 2017 was the met.ie tent, sitting in the middle of a small lake. Very heavy rainfall on the second day for my turn at the SCSI stall.


Video here of my talk.

Saturday 2 September 2017

Oysters and Guinness

An Irish delicacy - well recommended.

I grew up about 100 metres from the Broadmeadow estuary in Malahide, and I can still remember the remnants of a fishing village before the town expanded in the 80's and became the wealthy coastal village it is today with bustling marina, upgraded international cricket ground and other new additions.

Be not sparing, leave off swearing,
Buy my herring, buy my herring, buy my herring,
Fresh from Malahide, better ne'er was try'd.
Come eat 'em with pure fresh butter and mustard,
Their bellies are soft and white as custard,
Come, sixpence a dozen to get me some bread,
Or like my own herrings I too shall be dead.

Supposedly by Dean Swift, 1746

The estuary is a beautiful feature, with a number of wildlife sanctuaries around it. I never set foot in it until I was in my 20's when I rented a small sailboat for an hour. No-one in Malahide does, it is just for watersports - if you want to swim, you go to the beach on the far side of town or else a bit further afield to Portmarnock. I never understood why and still don't, even on the hottest of days.


But I was looking at an old map recently and I see that the estuary was once used for far more than watersports - there were a number of Oyster beds. I couldn't find the map last night - I was almost sure it was the 6" or 25" mapping on OSi map viewer but it does not have the map I am looking for. I did find an interesting page from the historical society discussing the effect the railway had on the oyster fisheries - the owner "was very favourably circumstanced till the railway was made, but the mud is since increasing." This page helped me track down the map in question - it was the Rocque map of 1760 which I cannot find in digital form online.

What had reminded me of this map was an interesting usecase of Landsat 8 imagery for identifying optimum sites for oyster beds in Maine - using Landsat 8 to calculate thermal properties of an area, turbidity and chlorophyll a, they could deduce where they could grow rapidly.



It would be an interesting study to see how the Broadmeadow estuary fares now - almost 200 hundred years since the railway was built - because the Guinness in Malahide is still great.

Thursday 10 August 2017

wifi mapping of building interiors using drones

This is extremely impressive - two drones operating in tandem on the exterior of a structure and mapping the interior remotely using wifi. Reference data and resulting 3D map below..


Tuesday 8 August 2017

Space Debris - Sentinel 1a

I posted last year about a collision with Sentinel 1a - something had struck one of the solar panels. A paper has recently been published from the hardware side - which is interesting to me as a downstream user - hypothesising the causes of the damage. Information on the debris tracked around that time plus info on change in orientation/position of the satellite help them to classify it.

Fascinating!

Wednesday 2 August 2017

Bonfires in Belfast - 11th/12th July 2017

I was dissapointed to find that there are very few Sentinel 2 or Landsat 8 night-time satellite images available over Ireland. Apparently you have to request it for Landsat and the S2 data acquisition plan doesn't currently capture any imagery at night. I wanted to see what the 11th night celebrations look like from space. After asking on ResearchGate I was directed back to the NASA firemapping service which I wrote about in May and had already forgotten about. Although the imagery is of a much coarser spatial resloution than the Sentinel or Landsat missions there are quite a number of hotspots visible all over the place - plus I have checked them against demographics/electoral districts and they seem to line up quite closely.


Hotspots picked out from space




Unionist majority areas most likely to celebrate the 11th/12th with a bonfire

Update: This imagery got me wondering what use they might be to me - they very clearly line up with the unionist demographics of the area (unsurprisingly) but correlating bonfire number/intensity versus turnout was one potential test, and for any previous elections post-July 12th could you use the fires to predict the turnout? The nationalist community internment remembrance bonfires are also due soon so it is a potential dataset for both communities...

Update: I've had a look again this morning (15th Aug) but the weather was too bad (almost 100% cloud cover)  so no visible August bonfires unfortunately. 





Tuesday 25 July 2017

Fermoy Flights

NCG have been performing some spectral tests recently over grass plots (grass with different levels of nitrogen applied) in the Teagasc research centre in Fermoy, Cork. This is part of the GRASS-Q project that kicked off late last year (Mohammad, Aidan and Tim) - some interesting result coming out of it. They were a man short on the drone team so I was down lending a hand yesterday AM flying it for them at the crack of dawn to get in before grass cutting. We had the Sequioa mounted on the 3DR and also used the OCI2000 Hyperspec operating on the ground for some additional spectral profiles. All this in conjunction with Teagasc research staff using the Grassshopper (sonic grass press with GPS).





Beautiful weather as you can see from the pic, beautiful all weekend - so was very disappointing to see we had three rejections for image acquisition on 22nd, 23rd and 24th on the Dublin Port project with Darragh.

Thursday 13 July 2017

More contrails

We're getting some really good results from the Pleiades Tri-Stereo and the TerraSARX Staring Spotlight derived models for the port - but following on from the recent post on contrails, this is another side to them - quite beautiful.

I can't find a link to the National Geographic video external from Twitter or Facebook but it has been reposted here.

Monday 19 June 2017

Clouds and Contrails

One of the projects we are working on is the SCSI/ESA funded "Satellites for BIM" assessing the suitability of satellites as a tool for planning and monitoring construction projects in coastal regions and ensuring environmental compliance throughout the project and afterwards when the site is operational. We have been awarded some TerraSARX Staring Spotlight imagery and some Pleiades Tri-Stereo Optical. The TSX data was very easy to order, due to the cloud penetrating capabilities, it was done in 2 emails. The optical on the other hand must wait for a cloud free opportunity to coincide with the satellite overpass - and we have had to cancel the last three acquisitions due to this. The weather over this weekend was great, really as good as Ireland gets in the summer but unfortunately the next overpass was not due until today. Looking at the HighRes visible image over the country there is a bank of cloud further north but Dublin bay (our target site) is relatively free from cloud cover, which is very promising. However, you do notice a network of intersecting lines of clouds that look to me from the pattern to mimic air traffic passing over Ireland to the UK and the rest of Europe and are therefore almost certain to be contrails left by airliner traffic overhead - and these are sitting over the bay.... I have listened to Gillian Whelan in UCC present a number of times on these - contrails can form a foundation for other clouds to form on, so they get bigger with time rather than smaller and they can spread over a significant distance. They also contribute to global warming as they reflect some of the suns energy back down to the earths surface.




Hopefully they wont interfere with the satellite tasking, it should be due in the next hour. Bad weather is due back again on Wednesday.


Update - Rejected!



Update 2 - What a difference a few days made. This was the S2a overpass on the 17th, hardly a cloud to be seen from Waterford to Armagh.



Update 3 - Success. We got lucky on the Tuesday. Tri-stereo Pleiades imagery captured - looking forward to seeing what we can make with it.


Tuesday 6 June 2017

USGS Updated Spectral Library

The USGS have released an update spectral ibrary - it even seems to contain the beginnings of an oil library. A lack of a suitable library (and cloud free dates to get images of slicks!) was one of the main problems I encountered in the iCRAG project so this is a very welcome update.

"Spectra of oil emulsions, residues and oil-contaminated marsh plants from the BP and Deepwater Horizon oil spills are included"

Primarily spill related but still better than nothing. I'm sure we have Mark Wahlberg to thank for it....

Saturday 3 June 2017

OPTIMISE BUS

OPTIMISE, an EU COST Action looking at spectral measurements from UAV are looking for respondents for a survey into people's uses of UAV for spectral measurement campaigns.

Fill it out if you have 5 mins free


No matter how many times i read that logo, i cant help but read it as OPTIMnISE.


Thursday 1 June 2017

Survey Ireland 2017

A very interesting line up at yesterday's Survey Ireland. 

Back in Malahide for the first time since 2008/9, a favourite venue over the years, the event was very well attended with topics including GSI mapping, BIM, drones, laser scanning, luas works, smart cities, satellite mapping and the Malahide viaduct collapse in 2009. I got to use some very interesting VR headwear (interestingly the 'exit' menu was accessed by looking in to a toilet bowl in the VR scene) and I saw two very interesting developments -the first was a total station/laser scanner combo made entirely of Lego and the second was a new lightweight measurement device from Leica capable of capturing spherical imagery, laser scan data and thermal imagery simultaneously.

I'll let the reader decide which is which - because I almost did not notice that one of them was made of Lego and was moving in with questions......



DIT veteran Kevin Mooney was also presented with an award at the event for his long service to Geomatics in both Ireland and abroad and took the opportunity to get a few well aimed digs in at the mucky boots in the audience - well done Kevin, for the digs and all the hard work.




I was peddling my usual wares on the 'applications of satellite imagery' and got quite a number of questions afterwards on where to get the software and data - hopefully some of the opportunities are becoming evident. I also got a nice bottle of wine for chairing the afternoon session - thanks for that SCSI.

Thursday 18 May 2017

Gorse Fires - Basic Payments Scheme

I see from The Journal that satellite imagery is being used to identify gorse burning with an eye to docking farmers through the basic payment scheme. I can certainly see how they could use it to quickly find the burning gorse using both optical (look for the fires / thermal signatures) or SAR (look for changes in backscatter following the burning) but I do not see how they can prove it was intentional using satellite imagery. I'll be following that one and may see something that the SCSI Rural group would be interested in. Additionally, the COPERNICUS emergency management service doesn't seem to have been activated - so that means the hi-res imagery wont be available free of charge for the period.

Thursday 11 May 2017

Interventions

I notice the University ePrints system has our recent paper (published in Inventions) listed as having been published in Interventions. 


I'm not sure what they are trying to tell us.

Wednesday 10 May 2017

Forest Fires

I cam e across a nice link posted over on the EO & RS in Ireland blog. NASA have a near-real time satellite mapping facility for forest fires and this is quite topical right now with the gorse fires in Galway after the recent unseasonal dry weather.


The satellite mapping has identified a number of hotspots around Ireland right now but when you look at the rest of the planet you start to see some countries experiencing hundreds of occurrences, such as Mexico, Guinea, India etc. Screengrab for the Congo below.


Monday 8 May 2017

CIG2017

The Conference of Irish Geographers 2017 was very enjoyable. I made my way to UCC (who hosted) to present our Slick Mapping results at the inaugural EO session. The usual culprits from MScs in GIS and RS were there scattered throughout the crowd. The Irish Geography community really is a tight-knit one, everyone knows everyone else and the atmosphere reminded me very much of Survey Ireland and the Geomatics community. Looking forward to next year when it is being hosted by NUIM and well done everyone involved this year.

Thursday 27 April 2017

Coastal Renewables - Electricity from Drones?

A innovation I have come across a number of times recently in wind energy is the use of light weight kites or similar to generational rotational energy. These are alot cheaper than the traditional turbines and easier and quicker to deploy. Looking through the Irish Times recently I came across an article about a plan to use drones in a kite surfing fashion to generate energy and a test site had already been identified off the coast of Mayo. Ireland 'has the best wind' apparently - just the best. It is interesting to see drones possibly providing energy as usually they just use it up!

Monday 24 April 2017

WaPOR

A UN project using satellite data for monitoring and improving water use and management in Africa and the Middle East has gone beta this week. They use real time satellite data (although quote 1 to 10 days as the time delay - so it is more near real time) and Google Earth Engine to do the processing. One to watch and must forward it to a Californian friend of mine who is dipping his toes into Precision Ag. Spatial resolutions of 30m to 250m, so I'm guessing Landsat is the smallest they use?


Thursday 13 April 2017

Potree - Denmark

This is extremely impressive. An RGB point cloud in a web viewer for the whole of Denmark - runs quite smoothly too but keep the fire extinguisher near the PC when you start panning to view multiple areas...


Thursday 30 March 2017

Launch of MUSSI

The Maynooth University Social Sciences Institute (of which NCG and NIRSA are part) is being launched today by Minister Richard Bruton. The place looks well!

Wednesday 22 March 2017

CIG 2017

I notice abstract deadline for the CIG is rapidly approaching - must get my skates on and see if we can present some of the iCRAG MAROBS platform highlighting our work in the coastal zone.

Tuesday 21 March 2017

Two new projects

A short update after a busy few weeks.

1) The 2 year change detection / change classification project has started and I hope to have some concrete information to post on that soon.

2) ESA has awarded the SCSI RS & EO Working Group a very generous allowance of Pleiades tri-stereo optical and TerraSAR X 'Staring Spotlight' imagery - we'll be starting a project looking at assessing the suitability of Satellites for BIM (i.e. the entire building lifecycle) in the coming months and will also hopefully have updates from that.

Wednesday 1 March 2017

Four Million Solar Panels

An interesting example of changes in the landscape detected by satellites in space, here we have FOUR MILLION solar panels installed in the Longyangxia Dam Solar Park in China. I have a feeling that China will go from being the bad boy of the emissions world to its shining light in the very near future, especially as the USA will take its foot off the gas (not literally - they will keep their foot on the gas just as much as before and their cars are MASSIVE) over the next four to eight years. I did a quick search and the solar panels begin to appear in Landsat 5 imagery in late 2012.


Tuesday 21 February 2017

Point Clouds and Archaeology

I came across a great video demonstrating what appears to be the fusion of aerial and terrestrial point clouds. This combination really is impressive and demonstrates potential for LiDAR and photogrammetry for archaeology.

link here

Saturday 11 February 2017

Drones and natural selection

I came across this post looking at a new microdrone capable of collecting pollen. This is proposed as a possible solution to the problems arising from the collapse of so many bee colonies. Colony Collapse Disorder has the potential to wipe out agriculture worldwide when we have nothing to pollenate crops.

It is an interesting solution from the technical side, but one that got me thinking on natural selection. Examples of plants that had developed particlar shapes or colours over millions of years so that specialist animals or insects were the only ones to unlock the pollen or nectar. In a horrible future where we had no bees and 'busy as a drone bee' was a common phrase, I could not think of any reason why natural selection might not also adapt plants to drones. Those that drones can pollenate easily are the first to thrive and those characteristics improve with each generation. Special petal arrangements to avoid damage from mini rotors, growing in wind-sheltered spots to help accurate IMU aided hovering. Avoiding GPS obscured regions near trees. No plants pollenated in aviation authority no-fly zones? Instead of reflecting particular patterns in the UV for an insects eyes, changing to reflect more strongly in other parts of the spectrum so the pollen is visible to a low grade multispectral camera.

The list goes on.

Thursday 9 February 2017

Sensor Pods and Sensor Fusion

Our short paper detailing system concept, design and calibration of the aerial sensor pod is now available online. This research feeds into a number of NCG projects including bathymetry, slick feature mapping, forestry, precision agriculture and infrastructure surveys. The sensor pod captures RGB, HD Video, thermal, multispectral and hyperspectral imagery and is a very rich dataset with multiple applications.


Saturday 4 February 2017

HD ISS Video

The first ISS video I ever watched was probably one of the most impressive things I have ever come across online. But as more and more of them were released, it was unavoidable not to become slightly desensitised to the amazing stuff in each release and just skip through them. This video is one of the most recent and also one of the best I have seen in some time - you really need to watch it in HD if you can, or at least the highest resolution your monitor will allow.

Thursday 2 February 2017

Space Archaeologist

What a great job title!? And another great example of a combination of satellite remote sensing and crowd sourcing to process and analyse data and help document and fight looting of archaeological sites. If you are interested in helping fight the loss of cultural heritage get involved here

....Could I be a Space Surveyor? A Space Cartographer? Earth observation and remote sensing is a bit of a mouthful...what about a Space Spatial Analyst...too far?

Wednesday 1 February 2017

Frost in the shade

Here is a beautiful satellite image brought to my attention by Daire. A Sentinel 2 RGB of the hillocks to the east of Clew bay - interesting landforms at the best of times, but the image taken that cold November morning caught all of the frost that was still present in the shadows of the hillocks. iIsuppose 'satellite image appreciation' is just one of the unexpected benefits of free, 10m imagery.



Thursday 26 January 2017

Environment and Planning B - Paper now available online

Our paper, "Data imputation in a short-run space-time series: A Bayesian approach" in Environment and Planning B demonstrating a methodology for imputing missing values in population statistics is now available online.



See the Sentinel 2b launch

Interested in Remote Sensing and Earth Observation? Want a seat at mission control in Darmstadt for the Sentinel 2b launch? Have a strong social media presence?

Enter here

Application deadline is February 1st!



Monday 23 January 2017

Time for some good climate change news

Yes! I see a positive headline on the RTE News main page. After years of depressing climate change news and months of depressing political news it most certainly is time Will, I'll have some of that! 


...click...

Unfortunately it turns out the main page article link is slightly misleading, and Will is also hoping that after years of depressing climate change news and months of depressing political news, it is time someone had some good news about climate change. So no good news...

COST Action reviews

COST Actions are an excellent way to meet other people in your discipline. I am a member of one, ES1309 Optimise which combines satellite and RPAS data for field measurements of fluorescence. I have acted as external evaluator reviewing COST actions proposals in the past and have recently been asked to review another, which brings me to the topic of this post. We all work in quite a specialist area - there are not hundreds of coastal remote sensers in Ireland. A COST action is an invaluable way for me to network with others in this field around the EU, but by agreeing to review the proposal I am precluded from having anything to do with that COST action from then onwards - which could be quite detrimental to collaboration.

From the T&Cs: 

"Independent External Experts having evaluated a proposal may not participate in the Action deriving from that proposal."

I understand that this excludes you from being the national rep on the management committee, but would it also exclude you from attending any workshops or conferences they organise throughout the action? Collaborating on a paper? Considering these are voluntary reviews it is quite prohibitive - i'll have to think it through before accepting this new request.

Additionally - something that was quite confusing the first time and lead to alot of back and forth, conflicts of interest arise if you have:

"a professional or personal relationship with a proposer."

Again - in such a specialised field and for a proposal from EU academics, you are almost certain to know one or all of them in your field. However the proposal does not list the applicants - so how do you judge? COST clarified it for me in the following statement last time:

"..as long as you do not identify a participant in a proposal you evaluate (or have a strong assumption on the identity of a participant) you may proceed, there is no conflict of interest."

Tuesday 17 January 2017

MarTERA cofunded (ERA-NET) 2017

The call for collaborative research projects in different areas of maritime and marine technologies is out  - deadline for initial proposals is 31st March.

Wednesday 11 January 2017

Mapping Shadows

Another example of someone using data that I usually tidy or throw away. This is a map of the shadows in satellite imagery, rather than the features that cause the satellites. Rather than as research this PhD student is using the sales of these images (as art) to fund their PhD!



Saturday 7 January 2017

Copernicus Market Report

This first Copernicus market report was released just before Christmas - promising significant savings accruing from the use of satellite data. Of particular interest to my colleagues at the SCSI and RICS will be the construction company savings through a "work progress monitoring app" (page 48 - building RADAR) and savings on insurance (Page 49). I must find out more about those...




Wednesday 4 January 2017

Finding aircraft in satellite imagery

An interesting study here on using satellite imagery to find aircraft. I have noticed them quite often in imagery we were using for coastal studies in Dublin bay (and therefore the approaches to Dublin airport - one of the busiest in Europe) but usually look on it as an error or 'noise' rather than the source of my study. The plane usually shows up as a superman-like blur in Red, Green and Blue due to imaging delays between the subsequent bands and the moving target (or possibly also due to elevation differences with the terrain underneath when creating the ortho).



They compare swath width and spectral resolution for Landsat and Sentinel to see which is best - I must give it a look for Dublin sometime.

Tuesday 3 January 2017

Google Earth Engine

I like new cars, but hate buying new cars because they decrease in value so quickly - hence my trusty Corolla. Similarly - I like new PCs. but hate buying new PCs, as they get slow and clunky very quickly. As data sizes increase, we are soon left staring at progress bars for hours. Ok - you can move everything onto a server like we have with some old hardware in our computer room for the slick mapping/Sentinel 1 analysis and leave things processing in the background - but these are still computers in effect, sitting in our lab, ageing. So one thing I am keeping an eye on is cloud processing - which although costly at present has great potential to cut down on hardware costs and always gives you the processing power you need. Google to the rescue once again - with Google Earth Engine (python and java friendly) can be used directly with QGIS for processing and also hosts most if not all of the Landsat and Sentinel archives already. 




Dáire recommended it to me a few months back but I was too distracted to sign up - however i have remedied that now and I've signed up to be a 'trusted tester'. I will start bringing this into my research and lecturing and see how I get on if I get approved.

Sunday 1 January 2017

Barlogue

Some beautiful UAV footage of Barlogue Creek and Lough Hyne that I came across online. I did my PADI Open Water diver tests in that channel in 2007. It wasn't that clear on the day, as we had had one of the wettest summers on record and all the run off had made the water very turbid. Still - some of my favourite spots in the country are around here. The clarity of the water provides some tempting sites to look at for optical bathymetry tests.


About Me

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My name is Conor. I am a Lecturer at the Department of Geography at Maynooth University. These few lines will (hopefully) chart my progress through academia and the world of research.