Satellite For Tracking World’s Water To Launch in 2022
November 22nd, 2021
Via India’s Tribune, an article on a forthcoming satellite that will track the Earth’s water:
An international team of engineers and technicians has finished assembling a next-generation satellite that will make the first global survey of the Earth’s surface water and study fine-scale ocean currents.
The Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission is scheduled for launch in November 2022, and the final set of tests on the spacecraft have started, according to a statement by NASA. SWOT is a collaboration between NASA and the French space agency Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES), with contributions from the Canadian Space Agency and the UK Space Agency.
The SUV-size satellite will collect data on the height of the Earth’s salt and fresh water — including oceans, lakes and rivers — enabling researchers to track the volume and location of water around the world.
SWOT will help to measure the effects of climate change on the planet’s water, such as the processes by which small, swirling ocean currents absorb excess heat, moisture, and greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The mission’s measurements will also aid in following how much water flows into and out of the planet’s lakes, rivers, and reservoirs, as well as regional shifts in sea level.
“SWOT will be our first global snapshot of all surface water that we have now, how the water moves around the planet, and what happens to it in a new climate,” said Nadya Vinogradova Shiffer, SWOT programme scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington, in the statement.
In June, the satellite’s scientific instruments were shipped to France, from the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the US. Ever since, the teams have been working to connect the part of the spacecraft holding the science instruments to the rest of the satellite and ensure that the electrical connections function properly.
The next six months will involve three phases of testing to make sure the satellite will be able to survive the rigours of launch and the harsh environment of space. Engineers and technicians will attach the satellite to a device called a shake table, which simulates the intense vibrations and rattling of launch. Then the spacecraft will move into an acoustic chamber to bombard it with high-decibel sounds similar to those of blastoff.
Next, the team will move SWOT into a chamber that mimics the temperature swings and vacuum of space. Finally the engineers will put the satellite through additional tests to make sure its systems can withstand any electromagnetic interference, including signals from various parts of the spacecraft and from other satellites. After that, the spacecraft will be shipped to the launch site.
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Read More »Creating A Searchable Earth
October 1st, 2021
Via siliconAngle, a report on Satellogic efforts to create a searchable, near-real-time view of Earth:
High-resolution satellite imagery provider Satellogic Inc. is tapping Amazon Web Services Inc.’s cloud to scale up its operations and eventually provide a live and extremely detailed catalog of the Earth’s surface that will be updated on a daily basis.
The company provides its high-resolution images of the Earth to decision makers in areas such as agriculture and forestry, energy and sustainability, critical infrastructure, finance and insurance, environment and climate, and government.
Satellogic currently operates a constellation of 17 satellites that can collect more than 5 million square kilometers of multispectral and hyperspectral images per day, which is approximately the size of Russia. The multispectral imagery makes it possible to see vivid details such as crops, roads, buildings and even objects such as ships, trucks or aircraft. The hyperspectral imagery provides even finer detail, revealing the spectral signatures that can identify different kinds of metals, polymers and vegetation species, and even detect the amount of moisture in an area.
Satellogic President Matt Tirman said the high-quality satellite imagery and data his company provides is critical to solving crucial issues around resource utilization and distribution. “For large-scale agriculture, our data can help answer questions about crop health, environmental impact, invasive pest lifecycles, drought or flood risks,” he said.
Each of Satellogic’s satellites is equipped to capture full-motion videos of up to 60 seconds, giving its customers the ability to observe short-term activity. Its satellites also “revisit” points of interest up to four times day to record activity there, aiding critical infrastructure monitoring and rapid response during emergency events. The company then uses artificial intelligence techniques to transform its images into data layers made accessible through a range of data services on its website. Examples include object identification, classification and semantic change detection.
Through all of this activity, Satellogic generates about 50 gigabytes of data each day, which is the equivalent of streaming 20,000 songs or 200 hours of standard-definition video.
It’s a lot of data and it’s about to grow significantly, for Satellogic has plans to expand its constellation to more than 300 satellites by 2025.
That explains the company’s decision to adopt AWS’s cloud infrastructure, so it can more easily scale its storage, processing and delivery capabilities with each new satellite launch.
AWS Aerospace and Satellite Solutions Director Clint Crosier told SiliconANGLE that Satellogic aims to increase its constellation to 60 satellites in order to weekly mapping of the Earth’s entire surface. By the time it has 300 satellites in orbit, it will be able to do daily mapping, he said.
“The goal is a live catalog of the Earth, or a ‘searchable Earth,’” he said. ”They want to image every square kilometer of the Earth every day and help make the world a better place from space.”
It’s an ambitious goal, and to achieve it, Satellogic needs the tools and infrastructure to capture, process and distribute far more data than it currently does now. Crosier said AWS will not only provide Satellogic with the ability to scale its operations, but also reduce its data processing times, optimize its costs and meet customer demand for near real-time imagery of any part of the Earth’s surface.
To speed up data processing, Satellogic will leverage Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Services and AWS Lambda. With Amazon EKS, Satellogic can run and manage Kubernetes-based container applications in the cloud and benefit from the flexibility afforded by scaling clusters based on the workload in its image processing pipeline. Not only does that reduce costs, but it speeds up image processing times by around 20% to 30%, Crosier said. The processed data is then made available via a serving layer that’s built on Amazon CloudFront and Amazon API Gateway.
“You can really only operate at scale in the cloud,” he said.
By scaling up its operations and enabling a searchable, near-real-time view of the entire globe, Satellogic’s data can be applied to more use cases than it currently is. For example, it will become possible to track oil pipeline spills from orbit to aid with cleanup operations, Crosier said. Satellogic’s data even has potential applications in insurance: An insurer could use the data to assess whether it should insure a shipping line based on the status of the harbors it uses.
Crosier said it’s still early days, but the prospect of enabling anyone to use satellite data opens up countless possibilities. He said space is smack in the middle of a digital revolution, and that AWS will play a key role in it.
“The cloud will become the indispensable platform on which the space revolution is built,” Crosier said. “Space is all about gathering large amounts of data, analyzing it and distributing it, and that’s what AWS does every day.”
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Read More »Addressing Deforestation via Remote Sensing Technology
August 18th, 2021
Via Africa News, a look at how deforestation can be mitigated using remote sensing technology:
Israeli-based Albo Climate and Mauritius-based Tembo Power are partnering on a mutually exclusive basis to produce a high-resolution carbon monitoring model of vulnerable tropical forests. The maps will help to evaluate ecosystem health carefully. Furthermore, they will monitor the areas for deforestation and generate verified high-quality carbon offsets.
The collaboration will begin by developing carbon credits from two national parks in Cameroon. Both parks are home to a diverse range of unique plants and endangered animals. This includes pangolins, hippos, leopards, black colobus, mandrills, lowland gorillas and chimpanzees. It also has numerous birds, reptiles and fish species. However, the parks face increasing threats due to logging, poaching, mining, agricultural activities and coastal infrastructure development. Thus, given current deforestation rates, the two forests may lose 6,000 hectares per year.
Jacques Amselem, CEO of Albo Climate, commented: “We are thrilled to be partnering with Tembo, a key leader in developing clean energy and conservation projects across sub-Saharan Africa. Combined with our unique deep-learning, satellite-based approach to carbon credit quantification and verification, we see the potential for true impact at scale across the continent.”
The expected income from the carbon offset projects will involve maintaining the park’s boundaries. It will also include expanded support of ranger services and surveillance systems by the forest management of Cameroon. In addition, the generated income will go to supporting local communities.
Furthermore, Albo Climate and Tembo will further collaborate on additional conservation projects across East and Southern Africa. This strategic partnership will foster a robust and widely applicable remote-sensing carbon model usable in Africa’s array of tropical forests. Tembo Power’s founder, Raphael Khalifa, explained: “Tembo’s goal is to position our subsidiary Tembo Climate in full compliance with the Taskforce on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets led by Mark Carney and Bill Winters, advocating for the extensive use of technology to address global warming”. He added that they were glad to bring Albo’s cutting edge approach to the African continent.
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Read More »Armed with Data and Smartphones, Amazon Communities Fight Deforestation
August 8th, 2021
Via Mongabay, an article on how – armed with data and smartphones – Amazon communities are fighting deforestation:
>Equipping Indigenous communities in the Amazon with remote-monitoring technology can reduce illegal deforestation, a new study has found.
> Between 2018 and 2019, researchers implemented technology-based forest-monitoring programs in 36 communities within the Peruvian Amazon.
Compared with other communities where the program wasn’t implemented, those under the program saw 52% and 21% less deforestation in 2018 and 2019 respectively.> The gains were concentrated in communities at highest risk of deforestation due to threats like logging and illegal mining.
Teaching Indigenous communities in the Amazon to tap on remote-monitoring technologies during forest patrols can reduce illegal deforestation, a new study has found.
Researchers, whose work was published July 12 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), implemented technology-based forest-monitoring programs in 36 communities in Loreto, the northernmost department of Peru, between 2018 and 2019. They trained and paid three representatives from each community to patrol their forests monthly and verify reports of suspected deforestation using a smartphone application and satellite data.
Compared with 37 other communities in Loreto where the program wasn’t implemented, those under the program saw 52% and 21% less deforestation in 2018 and 2019 respectively. The gains were concentrated in communities at highest risk of deforestation due to threats like illegal mining, logging, and the planting of illicit crops such as coca to manufacture cocaine, the researchers found.
The collaboration between Rainforest Foundation US (RFUS), the World Resources Institute (WRI), Indigenous leaders and independent researchers is the latest in a growing body of research that says recognizing and protecting Indigenous rights is the most effective way to preserve natural rainforests. In Latin America, studies have shown Indigenous people to be by far the best guardians of forests in the region, with deforestation rates up to 50% lower in their territories than elsewhere.
One-third of the Amazon Rainforest falls within formally acknowledged Indigenous peoples’ territories. Community-based forest monitoring programs coupled with enforcement support from local officials could save one-fifth of the 2.7 million hectares (6.7 million acres) of rainforest in Brazilian and Peruvian Indigenous territories likely to be lost over the next decade, RFUS estimated.
Deforestation alerts from satellite data have long been publicly available. WRI’s Global Forest Watch (GFW) tool relies on an algorithm developed by university researchers to detect changes in forest cover through satellite imagery. In Peru, the national Geobosques platform uses GFW data to issue early alerts of suspected deforestation.
However, these alerts rarely filter down to remote rainforest groups lacking reliable internet access, resulting in communities often detecting illegal deforestation activities only when they are well underway and difficult to halt.
“The whole point is to put the deforestation information into the hands of those most affected by its consequences and who can take action to stop it,” Tom Bewick, who is the Peru country director for RFUS and who was involved in the study, said in a statement.
During the two-year study, researchers hired couriers to traverse the Amazon River and its tributaries every month to deliver USB drives containing Geobosques reports of suspected deforestation to remote communities.
Trained representatives, or monitors, would then upload this information into a specialized smartphone application, which they used to navigate to the locations of forest disturbances during their monthly patrols. Where they identified cases of unauthorized deforestation, monitors would take photos as evidence and flag them to the community, which could then decide to report it to local authorities.
Monitors use the smartphone app Locus Map to identify GPS coordinates of deforestation for their regular patrols. Photo credit: Cameron Ellis
“We are helping them set up this system by which they can collect the evidence but our hope is that then we walk away,” Suzanne Pelletier, executive director of RFUS, said in a video. “They can then train others and be the model for thousands of other communities across the Amazon.”Over the two-year period, communities under the program saved 456 hectares (1,127 acres) of rainforest, preventing the release of more than 234,000 metric tons of carbon emissions at a cost of $5 a ton. This makes it slightly more expensive than the $4.30 a ton average price of nature-based, forest management carbon credits in 2019, according to data from Ecosystem Marketplace.
But while nature-based credits have traditionally been plagued by the problem of leakage — where ecosystem conservation projects, even if successful in one area, often shift deforestation to another location — the researchers observed no such displacement of deforestation for the communities in their study.
They theorized this could be due to the inaccessibility of the forests in Loreto. “In the region that we study, in the general absence of roads, most transportation occurs by boat. As a result, the areas most vulnerable to deforestation are located close to navigable rivers,” they wrote in their report. Since Indigenous communities in Loreto also tend to live along the river, community-based forest-monitoring programs increase the cost of resource extraction, they said.
A Kichwa monitor fills out a report confirming an occurrence of illegal deforestation after returning from a forest patrol. Photo credit: Melvin Shipa Sihuango
“The study provides evidence that supporting our communities with the latest technology and training can help reduce deforestation in our territories,” Jorge Perez Rubio, president of the Indigenous group Regional Organization of the People of the Eastern Amazon (ORPIO), said in a statement. ORPIO worked with RFUS and WRI to implement the forest-monitoring programs in the study.“Our network is ready to partner with Rainforest Foundation US to apply this technology-enabled model to our community forest protection initiatives basin-wide,” Gregorio Mirabal, general coordinator of the Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin (COICA), said in a statement. COICA, which was not involved in the study, is an umbrella association for Indigenous organizations in the Amazon lowlands, of which ORPIO is a part.
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Read More »The Internet of Wild Things: Technology and The Battle Against Biodiversity Loss and Climate Change
March 21st, 2021
Via TechRepublic, a look at the use of technology in the battle against biodiversity loss and climate change:
The potential to install a regime of benign surveillance over the natural world is immense, ranging from earth-observation satellites to smartphones listening out for chain saws in the forest.
The interrelated issues of biodiversity loss and climate change are rising fast up the popular and political agenda. One reason is that the world increasingly appears to be — on fire.
In August 2019, wildfires — many started deliberately — consumed large areas of Amazonian rainforest, reducing the Earth’s ‘lung capacity’, rendering indigenous people and wildlife homeless, and releasing copious amounts of greenhouse gases. In September, on the other side of the world, forests in Indonesian Borneo and Sumatra burned. Again, human agency is widely suspected, as palm oil planters clear the jungle to make way for their crop. Massive bushfires are currently raging in eastern Australia, which experienced its hottest recorded summer in 2018/19.
Wildfires are also occurring in the far North with increasing frequency and intensity: in June 2019 (the hottest on record in the region), fires in the Arctic emitted 50 megatons of carbon dioxide — equivalent to the total annual CO2 output from Sweden. Evidence that Arctic permafrost is melting faster than previously expected only exacerbates the carbon release problem.
Why is the world apparently fiddling while Rome burns?
The tendency for national governments to have a short-term focus, addressing immediate problems and deferring longer-term issues for successive administrations or generations, is not helpful when confronting planet-scale problems like climate change and biodiversity loss. That’s because incremental ‘business-as-usual’ activities can run into irreversible tipping points that flip systems unexpectedly into new and undesirable states (the Amazon being an increasingly urgent example).
Although supranational bodies such as the UN and the EU try to take a wider view of such issues, recent years have seen a rise in nationalism around the world, leading to suspicion and even rejection of such bodies, often accompanied by the denigration of scientific evidence and expertise.
The Internet of Things, or IoT, is an area of science and technology that can help in the fight against biodiversity loss and climate change. In this article we’ll outline the current state of the IoT and examine some examples of its use in vulnerable ecosystems.
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Read More »New Platform Aims to Reveal Dam and Climate Impacts on the Mekong
March 16th, 2021
Via The Third Pole, a look at a new platform which provides satellite imagery, maps and data which will show effects of dam building and climate change in the Mekong basin:
new monitoring platform that uses satellite imagery to track dam reservoir levels on the Mekong can shed light on the contentious issue of how the river’s precious water is stored, and the effects of climate change.
The disruption to water and sediment flows along the river resulting from the proliferation of dams “is causing the Mekong to die a death of a thousand cuts,” said Brian Eyler, director of the Stimson Centre’s Southeast Asia Programme.
He said the Mekong Dam Monitor, launched by the Stimson Center, promises to improve water resource management in the region and help researchers document changes to the climate.
Up to 60 million people depend on the Mekong for food and livelihoods. The 4,350-kilometre waterway originates in China, where it is known as the Lancang, before flowing through Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam.
Dams, roads worsened Himalayan flood impact manifold
China has built 11 hydropower dams, and 19 more are slated for construction. Along the full length of the Mekong and its tributaries, at least 102 dams impede flow according to the Stimson Center’s Mekong Infrastructure Tracker. This is significant because, in the dry season, as much as 70% of the water in the downstream Mekong comes from China.
Understanding the effects of climate change
As well as tracking reservoir levels, the Mekong Dam Monitor uses satellite imagery to reveal the “surface wetness” – relative wetness or dryness – of different parts of the basin. This provides information on how the dams affect river flow.
Eyler said the new tool provides data on melt rates in the snow-covered portions of the river’s upstream reaches. Researchers can combine data from the monitor with that from Eyes on Earth, a US-based consulting company that uses satellite images to address climate issues. The company, a partner of the Stimson Centre, is approaching 30 years of continuous satellite monitoring to understand climate change.
“To find climate change effects in the Mekong Basin, a user of the Mekong Dam Monitor could start with the climate anomaly maps which start in 1992 and run through the present day,” said Eyler. The maps show wetness, temperature, precipitation and snowmelt.
The two most apparent factors of climate change are general trends and variations of extreme events, according to Alan Basist, president of Eyes on Earth. He added that as the most pronounced impacts of climate change have become evident in the last 30 years, their data “provides a meaningful period of record to identify significant trends in surface wetness, surface temperature or snow cover”.
“The other feature we can monitor, which directly relates to climate change, is the variation in extreme events and their frequency,” Basist said, citing the Tonle Sap lake as an example of an area where the frequency of severe drought is changing.
A study released by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in December 2019 suggested the gravest threat to the Mekong delta in Vietnam, much like the Tonle Sap lake, is sediment starvation caused by upstream dams, rather than rising seas.
Gary Lee, Southeast Asia program director at International Rivers, said climate change and large-scale dams on the Mekong mainstream and tributaries make the river’s flows and water levels unpredictable.
“Large dams upstream are significantly reducing the amount of sediment reaching the Mekong delta, with major impacts on soil fertility, rice and agricultural production and fisheries, which provide significant sources of income and livelihoods for millions of people living in the delta,” he said.
According to a Mekong River Commission study, modelling on the current and planned Mekong dams finds that sediment reduction could be as high as 97% by 2040. This advisory body includes Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand.
“The Tonle Sap is dying because of Mekong dams that prevent water from reaching the lake,” said Cambodian-American Sophal Ear, associate professor of diplomacy and world affairs at Occidental College, Los Angeles.
“We all know how much protein from fish in the Tonle Sap means to Cambodians, and yet there’s seemingly no recognition that the dams are collapsing catches.”
China has repeatedly claimed that its dams prevent droughts and flooding and do not negatively affect the lower Mekong. In October, China agreed to release year-round water data through the Mekong River Commission from two hydropower stations.
“The positive benefits of upstream Lancang river hydropower on downstream Mekong neighbours are clear and obvious,” said the China Renewable Energy Engineering Institute in a December report.
River of rhetoric
Severe droughts have stripped away fishing and farming communities’ livelihoods in lower Mekong nations in recent years. In response, China has been called on to offer transparent information about its dams.
Eyes on Earth published a study in April 2020 claiming that Chinese dams along the Mekong held back water during life-threatening periods of drought caused by the monsoon’s failure in 2019.
In response, the Mekong River Commission said the report did not “provide robust scientific evidence that the storing of water in Chinese reservoirs caused the exceptionally low flows in the LMB [Lower Mekong Basin] at Vientiane in 2019 and 2020”. Another group of researchers made a similar criticism, arguing that data was being overinterpreted for political ends.
During Cambodia’s monsoon months, the river swells, expanding the Tonle Sap lake to five times its dry-season levels, depriving it of nourishing sediment that forms its ecosystem’s foundation. Consequently, fish breeding plummets and the communities lining the lake’s shore struggle to survive.
In early 2020, Vietnam suffered the double blow of drought and saltwater intrusion into its Mekong delta provinces. Fishing and agricultural communities were devastated by the loss of crops and drinking water contamination. A December report, coordinated by Vietnam’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry, said 1.3 million people fled the area over fears of natural disasters such as droughts.
A paradox in China’s energy machine
China’s state media has claimed that upstream dam regulations are beneficial to downstream countries because they reduce monsoonal floods and release water during the dry season. Eyler said there is “no evidence that these restrictions or releases are beneficial to the region”.
“No stakeholders downstream are calling for such regulation,” he said. “In fact, we’ve heard from dam operators downstream whose operations are impacted by upstream restrictions, and this is affecting their profit margins.”
Eyler added that the new monitoring tool provides evidence that “China’s upstream dam operations are purely coordinated and optimised for the purpose of producing a maximum amount of hydropower at a time when the price of electricity is high in China.”
Cecilia Han Springer, a senior researcher with the Global China Initiative at Boston University’s Global Development Policy Centre, said upstream impoundment has severe effects on downstream countries’ ability to manage their water.
However, Springer is more focussed on Mekong dams outside China. She has so far identified over 1,000 hydropower stations – on both the mainstream Mekong and its many tributaries – in lower Mekong countries, including a profusion of smaller hydropower projects involving Thai and Chinese developers. There are 11 mainstream dams in various stages of planning or completion on the Lower Mekong. The Nam Ou, a vital river that feeds the Mekong, has seven dams, all with Chinese construction or development involvement.
She says it’s difficult to parse the effects of climate change from smaller hydropower projects. Still, a recent paper looking at emissions from reservoirs in the Mekong region found some, including for hydropower projects, release greenhouse gas emissions on a par with some fossil fuel plants.
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