Jan 7, 2021

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, humanity noted several effects of lockdowns on the Earth system from orbit, including vacant highways, and reductions in air pollution. People affected in Venice reported that the local waters were clearer than they had been in decades. Milad Niroumand-Jadidi and colleagues at the University of Trento and […]

Nov 23, 2020

Improving crop yields, vigor and health, can be facilitated by better monitoring of the cross-sectional area of vegetation—i.e., Leaf Area Index or LAI. However, measuring LAI on the ground is time consuming and expensive. Sentinel-2, operated by the European Space Agency, publishes a global LAI product; but at 10m resolution and a […]

Oct 12, 2020

Glacial lakes in mountainous regions are prone to outburst floods that can devastate entire communities. With climate change, glacial ice is thinning and retreating in the Hindu Kush, Karakoram and Himalaya region, posing an increasing threat to human life and requiring improved monitoring. Nida Qayyum, in the Department of Space Science at […]

Aug 12, 2020

On a rapidly changing Earth, space-based imaging provides one of the most critical inputs to our scientific understanding of the whole Earth system. With the rapid increase in the number of medium- to high-resolution imaging sensors, there is increasing need for standard calibration methodology. An increase in sensor fusion, in which researchers […]

Jul 30, 2020

Change in vegetation color, chemistry and metabolic activity is one of the most striking signals of life in our biosphere. Satellite imagery plays an important role in effectively retrieving and mapping these vegetation changes over time—also called phenology. The rapid revisit period of the PlanetScope cubesat constellation provides researchers with a unique […]