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Nature on Earth Monitoring, Italian Satellite, Israel GeoPortal and more
posted by Satri
on Monday December 10, @01:53PM
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from the will-we-ever-monitor-too-much? dept.
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from the will-we-ever-monitor-too-much? dept.
Some interesting news item: Spatial Sustain discuss a long Nature article on Earth Monitoring. Meanwhile, Space.com tells us Italy successfully launched COSMO (previously mentioned), dubbed "the second of four Italian mapping satellites that are planned for the Constellation of Small Satellites for Mediterranean basin Observation (COSMO)" by SS. Additionally, SS underlines the launch of the Mapping Center of Israel with 120 layers (in Hebrew only). And finally, APB tells us about Localvore, the 2007 word of the year for the Oxford American Dictionary, as you have probably guessed, a locavore is someone who eats food grown or produced locally. From the Nature article: "If that increase in technological capability can be turned into usable systems, then the ability to monitor Earth's environment will be revolutionized. Real-time and near-real-time data will be available on soil moisture, greenhouse-gas concentrations, biological productivity, aerosol concentrations and so on, all around the world. With those data, scientists will be able to build and study models of Earth as a system far beyond what they have today."
« Geospatial Gifts for Christmas and GPS Everywhere | Google Earth: Alabama, Population Maps, U.S. Elections 2008 and Route Planner »
Related Stories
Industry: Israel Wiped Off A Map 3 comments
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Not trying to start a flame war, but this story from The New York Jewish Times, linked from the GeoCarta blog, about a UN-sponsored event where Israel is missing from the map indicates that maps matters. The Cartography blog links to the map. The GeoCarta summary: "United Nations Ambassador John Bolton promised to pursue the issue of what he termed, UN-sponsored anti-Israeli campaigns. Ambassador Bolton specifically mentioned the UN sponsored, "Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People." At the event, there was displayed a, "Map of Palestine" from which the nation of Israel had been expunged."
Israel - Lebanon Conflict and Geospatial Data Access
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The Ogle Earth blog share an interesting entry on the impact of geospatial technologies and data access on the Israel - Lebanon conflict. From a Defense-Update article: "Target analysis, including coordinates gathering has been dramatically improved in recent months, as a significant part of Israel was included in "Google Earth" service, offering everyone a free access to relatively high resolution satellite images of Israel, provided with fairly accurate GPS coordinates which are accurate enough to support the aiming of rocket attacks."
Technology: GIS in Italy
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GIS Monitor runs two issues on GIS in Italy, the first one provides an overview of GIS in Italy while the second specifically on Milan's GIS for city statistics. From the former: "While GPS-based car navigation systems are ever more popular in Italy as they are throughout Europe, the country lags behind many countries on the continent in the development of GIS and GIS training. However, this is beginning to change due to several initiatives in Northern Italy and at the national level. [...] The most important current GIS development in Italy is an agreement between the national, regional, and local governments ("Intesa Stato-Regioni-Enti Locali per la realizzazzione dei sistemi informativi geografici" or "Intesa GIS" for short), which has been developing technical specifications—including some aimed at the unification of cartographic production and opening GIS toward various methods of data capture."
Technology: Italian COSMO-SkyMed SAR-Satellite Launched
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The EOportal summarize a Spacemart article on the successful launch of COSMO-SkyMed, an Italian synthetic aperture radar (SAR). Both the article and Wikipedia don't provide much information on the capabilities. From the article: "[...] he COSMO-SkyMed program for the Italian Space Agency and the Italian Ministry of Defence. It is an end-to-end Earth observation dual-use (civil and military) system composed of four medium-sized satellites and supporting ground stations for orbit control systems and data reception and processing." From the wikipedia article: "The space segment of the system will include four satellites equipped with [X-Band] synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensors."
Watching Syria and Israel Conflit with Satellite Imagery
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Ogle Earth discuss and links the quick demolition of a potential Syrian nuclear facility after the Israel September 6th attack shown through satellite imagery (with screenshots). There's a link to a BBC News article and a New York Times article. While the geospatial content of this story is rather low, it clearly shows how satellite imagery is more than ever before a effective detective tool for the military and the general public. From the NYT article: "David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a private group in Washington that this week released a report on the Syrian site, said Thursday that the building’s removal was inherently suspicious.
“It looks like Syria is trying to hide something and destroy the evidence of some activity,” Mr. Albright, a former United Nations weapons inspector, said in an interview. “But it won’t work. Syria has got to answer questions about what it was doing.”" See other interesting related previous stories below. And if you wonder, high resolution satellite imagery for this area is available in Google Earth but not Google Maps at the moment.
Global Earth Observation System of Systems and SERVIR 2 comments
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Spatial Sustain runs an entry on Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) and SERVIR, a related project in Central America. GEOSS was discussed here two years ago. From SS: "The need for real-time data on changes in the Earth’s lands, oceans, atmosphere and biosphere is being fueled in large part by the billions of dollars and thousands of lives that could be saved by using this system for disaster preparedness.
After just two years of existence, GEO has developed 100 different programs and products to monitor and share data about the Earth. The ultimate goal is to link the world’s widely dispersed monitoring devices such as buoys, weather stations and earth observation satellites into one seamless system with a centralized Web portal."
Industry: Using Google Earth to Find Ancient Cities
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SlashDot is currently running a discussion about this. From their summary : "A story in the online site of the Aussie science mag Cosmos discusses how archaeologists are using sophisticated satellite images to find previously undiscovered cities. What 's really cool is how some are simply using Google Earth — and discovering all sorts of previously unknown sites!"
Head on over their to get more information and a link to the real story, as well as observe the conversation as it unfolds.
Head on over their to get more information and a link to the real story, as well as observe the conversation as it unfolds.
Nature on Earth Monitoring, Italian Satellite, Israel GeoPortal and more
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