Slashgeo

Hyperspectral remote sensing has not received a lot of attention in the last few years, probably due to the difficulty of obtaining hyperspectral imagery. That said, the weogeo blog runs a long entry on hyperspectral imaging for water applications. From the entry: "An advantage of HSI is automatically rendering data into feature extracted maps. Automated, in this case, means that an algorithm (as opposed to an expert) can render the imaging data stream into maps of bathymetry, red tides, sea grass beds, wetlands vegetation, habitat maps, land use change, etc. Automated is important because these imaging data can be terabytes in size. [...] Trying to manipulate and analyze the imagery for features, targets, and materials taxes the time and computer systems requirements to the point of making HSI technology and products the realm of the few." See also related stories.

Spatial Sustain discuss the water crises which are on the rise in United States and links to maps of U.S. drought monitoring. From the blog: "Climate change and aging infrastructure are to blame for the latest woes, but it’s been a crisis in the waiting for years. An excellent feature on the coming crisis appeared in U.S. News and World Report in August 2002. At that point it was projected that hundreds of billions would need to be spent to fix the problems. Water quantity and quality are huge environmental issues going forward, begging for better infrastructure and monitoring systems." In related stories below, I copied several related stories on water stress elsewhere.