Category: Uncategorized

Introductory Webinar: Remote Sensing of Coastal Ecosystems
August 25, September 1, & September 8, 2020
11:00-12:00 EDT (UTC-4)

Remote sensing of coastal and marine ecosystems is particularly challenging. Up to 80% of the signal received by the sensors in orbit comes from the atmosphere. Additionally, the constituents of the water column (dissolved and suspended) attenuate most of the light either through absorption or scattering. When it comes to retrieving information from the ocean floor, even in the clearest waters, only less than 10% of the signal originates from it. Users, particularly those with little remote sensing experience, stand to benefit from this training covering some of the difficulties associated with remote sensing of coastal ecosystems, particularly beaches and benthic communities such as coral reefs and seagrass.  Register here!

*As of August 2020, all ARSET content will be found at https://appliedsciences.nasa.gov/what-we-do/capacity-building/arset.

GEOAquaWatch is pleased that 2 projects under our water quality umbrella were selected by GEO and Google for funding Google Earth Engine credits!  The Alert System for Algae in Brazil and AquaWatch in the USA.  You can read the entire announcement here.

Please Save-the-Dates of May 24-28, 2021 for the 2nd International Operational Satellite Oceanography Symposium in Darmstadt Germany, sponsored by EUMETSAT and NOAA.  This FREE Symposium will be open to all interested international participants in the global satellite oceanography community and geared toward building off the outcomes of the successful 1st Symposium.  View the full meeting announcement here.  The Sponsors are also please to announce the 1st OSOS Summary Report is now available!

We are thrilled to announce that GEO AquaWatch, in partnership with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Space Science and Engineering Department, has been awarded a one year $86,000(USD) grant from the University of Wisconsin-Madison to initiate development of a water quality information system. The project titled “Development of a Global Water Quality Portal Using the SSEC RealEarth™ Framework” uses visualization technology to create an open, web-accessible visualization tool with capabilities including map displays of satellite-derived water quality information, in situ data sources, providing live graphs, and charts with daily updates and trends that draw attention to water quality issues. The website will also take advantage of RealEarth™ mobile device alert capabilities and social media sharing.

The new publication A Virtual Geostationary Ocean Color Sensor to Analyze the Coastal Optical Variability  authored by Dr. Marco Bracaglia and others at CNR ISMAR, might be of interest to the Water Quality Community deliberating Analysis Ready Data.  This work was carried out as part of Marco’s doctoral thesis, where he created an hyper-temporal analysis-ready Ocean Color (OC) dataset, named Virtual Geostationary Ocean Color Sensor (VGOCS). This dataset contains the observations acquired over the North Adriatic Sea by the currently functioning near-polar orbiting sensors, allowing approaching the geostationary sensor temporal resolution.  The VGOCS dataset is defined as an analysis-ready dataset as it is conceived to provide to users, without the expertise in pre-processing procedures, “ready to use” OC data to analyze the coastal optical variability at the high temporal resolution, similarly to the CEOS Analysis Ready Data for Land (CARD4L).