Between the Poles

Satellites and geospatial together help detect illegal fishing

At GeoBusiness 2017 in London, Stuart Martin, CEO of Catapult Satellite Applications, made the case for importance of the integration of satellite data into geospatial technology.   He cited a widely publicized figure that we capture 2.5 x 10**18 bytes (2.5 quintillion bytes or 2.5 exabytes) per day.  Earth observation satellites are rapidly approaching new records with respect to coverage, geospatial resolution, temporal resolution and breadth of hyperspectral range.  Satellites are capable of sub-meter resolution.   Satellite constellations can capture the entire Earth daily and this is expected to apporach hourly soon.  Radar on satellites can see through clouds and radar interferometry can detect changes with a resolution of two centimeters.  There are plans in place for over 50 satellite constellations to be launched in the next 10 years.

The Catapults network was established by Innovate UK to support innovation by UK business by providing access to expert technical capabilities, equipment, and other resources required to take innovative ideas from concept to reality.  Catapults are not-for-profit, independent physical centres which connect businesses with the UK’s research and academic communities.

The other part of the increasing importance of Earth observation satellites is that access to this data is becoming more open and less restricted either by regulation or economics.  Google and Yahoo and others incorporated Digital Earth and other imagery into their basemaps a long time ago, but this imagery is usually out of date and of varying quality, especially with the current state of earth observation imagery where new imagery is being captured daily.  Bird.i, based in Glasgow, is committed to making digital earth observation imagery available to the mass.   At the beginning of 2017, three leading imagery suppliers, Airbus, Bluesky and DigitalGlobe agreed to become Bird.i’s image suppliers.   Now Bird.i curates more than 10 million sq km of the satellite, airborne, and drone imagery every day from multiple sources with 1.5 meters resolution or better.

As an example of how geospatial technology works with satellites to solve major world problems is illegal fishing.  Between a third and a fifth of all fish landed are caught illegally which increases the difficulty of preventing overfishing of vulnerable species.  Satellites are now being applied to detecting illegal fishing. Satellite-AIS (S-AIS) is a satellite-based automatic tracking system used for collision avoidance among over 200,000 ships, especially in international waters.  AIS provides unique identification (signature), position, course, and speed for individual ships.  Satellites have special AIS receivers which are capable of deconflicting a large number of signatures.  The International Maritime Organization requires AIS to be fitted aboard international voyaging ships with 300 or more gross tonnage and all passenger ships regardless of size.  Global Fishing Watch analyzes data from AIS, which is collected by satellites and terrestrial receivers, to identify apparent fishing Apparent Fishing behavior based on the movement of vessels over time. Currently over 60,000 fishing vessels are tracked.  Partners supporting Global Fishing Watch include Oceana, Skytruth and Google. 

Indonesia, one of the largest fishing nations, has just announced that it is now sharing its proprietary Vessel Monitoring System (VMS) data for public display on Global Fishing Watch site  and Peru has announced that it will also share its VMS data on Global Fishing Watch.

Monitoring integrity of water networks with satellites

I am at HxGNLive in Las Vegas this week.  One of the several very interesting presentations with important implications for a number of industries is a talk by Massimo Zotti of Planetek.  He described an application called Network Alert that uses satellite observations to monitor ground displacements including subsidence with millimeter precision.  An application of this technology is water utilities who use it to look for subsidence and other ground displacements which are symptoms of water leaks.

Network Alert uses Sentinal-1 satellites whose frequent revisits over the same area allow changes in land cover to be closely monitored.  Sentinel-1’s C-band synthetic aperture radar provides ‘radar interferometry’ by combining two or more radar images over the same area to detect changes occurring between acquisitions. Interferometry allows for the monitoring of even slight ground movement – down to a few millimetres – across wide areas.

Network Alert uses radar interferometry to provide accurate, current information about ground instability and displacements in a water pipeline network that indicate leaking pipes. It alerts the utility to prioritize inspection and maintenance activities.  Monthly updates provide accurate information based on continuous satellite monitoring of ground movement and displacement.  For example, over one and a half years a 3 cm subsidence was evidence of a substantial leak.

Planet Labs' 144 satellites can image entire Earth every day

Yesterday Planet Labs launched 88 Dove satellites to orbit. They were launched on a PSLV rocket from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, India.  Planet Labs now operates 144 satellites in low Earth orbit. Each of the latest satellites has a 200 mbps downlink speed and is capable of collecting over 2 million km² per day which means that the entire constellation has the capability to image all of Earth’s landmass every day.  Planet Monitoring allows you to define an area of interest which can be local, regional, national, or global in scale and a frequency with which to receive imagery: daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly.  Applications include energy, mining, finance, and critical infrastructure for power or transport.

China joins Japan, U.S. and Canada in launching greenhouse gas observing satellite

On December 21, 2016 China launched a 620 kg micro-satellite on a Long March-2D rocket to monitor its greenhouse gas emissions. The TanSat satellite is in a sun synchronous orbit 700 km above the earth and will monitor the concentration, distribution and flow of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. TanSat will take readings of global carbon dioxide every 16 days, accurate to at least 4 parts per million.

Japan

On January 23, 2009, Japan launched the Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite (GOSAT). It measures the densities of carbon dioxide and methane from 56,000 locations on the Earth's atmosphere. GOSAT was developed by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). The Japanese Ministry of the Environment and National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES) use the data to track greenhouse gases.

U.S.

On July 2, 2014 NASA launched the OCO-2 satellite on a Delta II rocket to study carbon dioxide concentrations and distributions in the atmosphere. OCO-2 makes measurements in three different spectral bands over four to eight different footprints of approximately 1.29 km × 2.25 km each. About 24 soundings are collected per second while in sunlight. Of these about 10% are sufficiently cloud free for further analysis. One spectral band is used for column measurements of oxygen (A-band), and two are used for column measurements of carbon dioxide.

Canada

On June 21, 2016 Canada's GHGSat Inc. launched its Claire nanosatellite. Claire can measure emissions from any industrial site in the world. Greenhouse gases can be monitored with a precision in parts per million / billion, depending on the gas, with a geospatial resolution in tens of meters. On December 9, 2016, Claire measured emissions from a cement plant in South Africa, its 500th measurement.

TanSat OCO-2 GOSAT GHGSat

Earth observation satellite Worldview-4 with a resolution of 30 cm launched

After a long delay Worldview-4 has been launched.  This means that now the DigitalGlobe constellation of satellites can photograph any spot on Earth more than 4 times per day at a resolution of 30 cm (panchromatic) or 120 cm (multi-spectral which include near infrared) and with a locational accuracy of 3 meters.  Worldview-4's orbit is 617 km above the Earth.  It has an average revisit time of less than a day and can capture 680,000 square km, which is 70 terabytes of imagery per day.  (The Earth's surface area is 510 million square kilometers.)

This augments the16 years or 80 petabytes of Earth-observation imagery that DigitalGlobe holds in its library. 

Digital Globe has put all of the data on the public cloud (Amazon) and has provided a platform that supports efficient search, processing and workflows. GBDX is an online environment for efficiently running advanced algorithms for information extraction from imagery datasets at scale.  It is a set of RESTful APIs, and algorithms that have already been implemented by Digital Globe or its partners include car counting, orthorectification, land use, land cover, and atmospheric compensation.  One of the most important efficiencies of the GBDX architecture is that it avoids having to move huge volumes of data over the internet.  It does this by bringing the application to the data, rather than the data to the application. 

Study suggests U.S. responsible for major part of atmospheric methane rise over past decade

 Methane is one of the more potent greenhouse gases for global warming.  The concentration of methane in the atmosphere stabilized from about 1999 to 2007, but since 2007 began rising again.  A recent study suggests that the more than 30% increase in U.S. methane emissions over the 2002–2014 period could account for 30–60% of the global growth of atmospheric methane seen in the past decade.

When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau visited President Barack Obama in March, one of the topics that was discussed was joint action on climate change. Specifically, Canada and the United States committed to new actions to reduce methane pollution from the oil and natural gas sector.

In March, 2014 the U.S. Administration issued Strategy to Reduce Methane Emissions, which outlined steps to cut methane emissions.  In the summer of 2015 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed standards to directly address methane from new and modified sources in the oil and gas sector with the goal of reducing methane emissions from the oil and gas sector by 40 to 45 percent below 2012 levels by 2025. But studies from the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and others have provided significant new data on methane emitted by existing operations in the oil and gas sector that show that "methane emissions are substantially higher than we previously understood" in the words of Gina McCarthy, EPA Administrator.

In 2012, the EDF initiated a series of 16 independent projects designed to find out how much and from where methane is escaping into the atmosphere across the entire natural gas supply chain: production; gathering lines and processing facilities; long-distance pipelines, storage, and local distribution; as well as some end users using natural gas, commercial trucks and refueling stations. This investigation involved nearly 100 research and industry experts.

Scientists collected data using aircraft and ground-based platforms in the Texas Barnett Shale. Using this data they estimated regional and facility-level methane emissions and found that regional methane emissions are 50 percent higher than estimates based on the Environmental Protection Agency’s Greenhouse Gas Inventory.

Methane emissions from local gas distribution systems were also investigated it was and found that methane emissions from local natural gas distribution systems are significant.  The EDF and Google Earth Outreach released interactive maps that show methane leaking from pipelines under city streets.

The Denver-Julesburg Flyover Study found that methane emissions were three times higher than estimates derived from EPA data.

A study assessed the spatial distribution of anthropogenic methane sources in the United States by combining comprehensive atmospheric methane observations, extensive spatial datasets, and a high-resolution atmospheric transport model. Based on the results of this analysis the authors concluded that the EPA underestimates methane emissions nationally by a factor of ∼1.5 and regionally by ∼4.9.

A recent study which analyzed GOSAT satellite and surface observations of atmospheric methane suggests that U.S. methane emissions have increased by more than 30% over the 2002–2014 period.  This contrasts with EPA estimates which indicate that emissions remained flat over this period.  The increase is largest in the central part of the country. The spatial pattern of the methane increase seen by satellite does not clearly identify the sources of the increase.  The renewed growth in atmospheric methane between 2005 and 2010 is estimated to be due to an increase in global methane emissions of 17–22 teragrams per year  (Tg/yr). The new results suggest that increasing U.S. anthropogenic methane emissions could account for up to 30–60% of this global increase.  The authors state that a better understanding of U.S. anthropogenic methane emissions, particularly those from the livestock and oil and gas sectors, is needed.  The U.S. EPA inventory gives only national totals, so identifying sectors responsible for the increase is difficult. A spatially resolved version of the U.S. EPA inventory is currently under development.

The EPA's next annual methane report is due to be published by April 15 and it will be interesting to see what the EPA is doing to address the significant difference between its estimates and the estimates from academic researchers.

The shale oil and gas sector in the U.S. has been largely unregulated.  In 2005 Congress passed the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which was an omnibus energy bill that included the so-called "Halliburton loophole" which exempted hydraulic fracturing from protections under the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, and CERCLA, which means that fracking has not been regulated at the federal level.  

Since Prime Minister Trudeau's visit to President Obama the EPA has initiated a formal process to require companies operating existing oil and gas sources to provide information to assist in the development of comprehensive regulations to reduce methane emissions.  The EPA is issuing an Information Collection Request (ICR) to gather information on existing sources of methane emissions, technologies to reduce those emissions and the costs of those technologies in the production, gathering, processing, and transmission and storage segments of the oil and gas sector.  The goal is to take a closer look at regulating existing sources of methane emissions, in other words, to set more aggressive rules for reducing methane emissions from existing oil and gas facilities.

EPA intended to begin the ICR process In April by signing a draft information collection request that will be made available for public comment. The agency will revise that draft as necessary based on comment and send it to the Office of Management and Budget for additional review and input. Once the collection request is approved– which can include surveys and required emissions monitoring – it will go to industry, which is required to respond and attest that the information it provides is accurate. EPA’s goal is to receive the first phase of information later this year. 

The EPA began the ICR process May 12, 2016.

Falcon 9 launches satellite into geosynchronous orbit and successfully returns first stage to barge

A Falcon 9 rocket delivered a Japanese satellite into Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit (GTO) and successfully returned its first stage to SpaceX's "Of Course I Still Love You" drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean.  JCSAT-14 is a communications satellite owned by SKY Perfect JSAT Corporation.

Screen shot of the Falcon 9 first stage landing on the Of Course I Still Love You drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean.

This is the third successful return of a Falcon 9 first stage.  One was returned to hard ground, and two have returned successfully to an ocean barge.  This launch inserted its payload into a geosynchronous orbit which requires higher velocities than lower Earth orbits.

Falcon 9 is a two-stage rocket designed and manufactured by SpaceX for the transport of satellites and the Dragon spacecraft into orbit.  Falcon 9’s first stage has nine Merlin (named after the Rolls Royce engines used most famously in Spitfires ?) engines and can sustain the shutdown of up to two of these engines and still complete its mission.  The Falcon 9 first stage generates more than 7.6 million N (1.7 million pounds) of thrust at sea level.  It can deliver a payload of 22.8 tonnes to low Earth orbit (LEO), 8.3 tonnes to GTO, and an estimated 4 tonnes to Mars.  A key feature of the first stage is that it is designed to be able to fly itself back to Earth to a safe landing, so it is reusable.

Another distinguishing feature of the Falcon 9 is that it uses a pneumatic stage separation system  unlike the pyrotechnic systems used on most launch vehicles.  A major advantage of pneumatics is that it can be tested non-destructively.

GeoBuiz 2016: High volume geospatial imagery processing requires new architecture

DigitalGlobe owns and operates a constellation of commercial earth observation satellites.  The latest is Worldview-3 which is capable of about 30 cm precision.  Digital Globe's satellites collect 3,000,000 square kilometers of Earth imagery every day, that's about 70 terabytes of data per day.  Digital Globe also provides online access to 15 years of earth imagery, about 90 petabytes.  Of all high-resolution commercial imagery collected since 2010, Digital Globe has collected approximately 80% of it.  Clearly as a user you can't download all of this data, so how can users do things like search through this huge data set and generate a product such as a vegetation map for Tanzania ?

At the GeoBuiz 2016 Summit in Bethesda this week, Walter Scott, CTO and Founder, outlined how  Digital Globe is making this vast amount of high resolution data accessible to and usable by customers.  To make it possible for customers to search and process this data efficiently, Digital Globe has put all of the data on the public cloud (Amazon) and has provided a platform that supports efficient search, processing and workflows. GBDX is an online environment for efficiently running advanced algorithms for information extraction from imagery datasets at scale.  It is a set of RESTful APIs, and algorithms that have already been implemented by Digital Globe or its partners include car counting, orthorectification, land use, land cover, and atmospheric compensation. 

One of the most important efficiencies of the GBDX architecture is that it avoids having to move huge volumes of data over the internet.  It does this by bringing the application to the data, rather than the data to the application.  For example, to search through the data, GBDX provides a catalog API that uses 39 different image attributes such as geographic location, cloud cover percentage, sensor type, sun angle and others.  The search runs locally on Amazon, avoiding pushing data over the internet.

The GBDX API includes support for workflows.   A workflow is a sequence of tasks executed against sets of data. A typical workflow is initiated with a search for the data you want to process.  The selected data is assigned to a working set, and then processed  through a sequence of steps to generate your desired product.   For example, a typical product would be an orthorectified vegetation map.  Again the workflow runs locally on Amazon, avoiding pushing data over the internet during processing.  Only the final product resulting from the workflow, such as a vegetation map, would be transferred over the internet to the customer.

GBDX uses the cloud infrastructure of Amazon Web Service (AWS).  Data is stored in S3 ‘buckets’ that are accessed through GBDX RESTful web service APIs. GBDX includes built in tools supporting remote sensing algorithms from DigitalGlobe and ENVI.  GBDX is python-friendly and allows you create your own tools.

One of the application areas that the platform makes possible is deep learning.  The basic concept is that software can simulate the brain's large array of neurons as an artificial “neural network".  Large volumes of input data and some way of quantitatively assessing the results are required to train the system.  With the greater depth enabled by new computers and algorithms, remarkable advances in speech and image recognition are being achieved.  For example, a Google deep-learning system that had been shown 10 million images from YouTube videos proved almost twice as good as any previous image recognition effort at identifying objects such as cats.  Microsoft has demonstrated speech software that transcribes spoken words into English text with an error rate of only 7 percent.

But deep learning requires a lot of compute power and a lot of training.  GBDX provides the computational power to apply deep learning to earth observation and Digital Globe's data library can provide the training data sets.  What is required is a scalable way of assessing and quantifying the results. Walter Scott suggested crowd sourcing as a way of achieving the scale required for earth observation training.

GeoBuiz Summit April 26-27 includes construction, utilities, UAVs and cubesats

GeoBuiz Summit is an innovative conference that brings together key industry innovators and leaders to discuss and share knowledge and experience about the evolving technology trends, market behavior, and business models in the geospatial community including vertical markets such as construction and utilities.

Some of the themes in this year's conference include

• Geospatial Technology Trends and Business Models
  • Includes Sanjay Kumar, CEO, Geospatial Media;  Bryn Fosburgh, Vice President, Trimble;   Bradley Skelton, Chief Technology Officer, Hexagon Geospatial; Walter Scott, Founder and CTO, DigitalGlobe; and Bhupinder Singh, Chief Product Officer, Bentley
• BIM: Empowering Infrastructure lifecycle
  • Includes Roger Grant, National Institute of Building Sciences and Tracy McLane, Bechtel Infrastructure and moderated by Deke Smith, buildingSmart
• UTILITIES: Critical Infrastructure Operations and Management
  • Joel Campbell, Avineon; Peter Batty, Ubisense; Geoff Zeiss, Between the Poles; Matthew Thomas, NovaraGeo and president-elect of GITA; Elizabeth Z. Bialek, East Bay Municipal Utility District; Ramzi K. Bannura, AGSI USA; Dr. Henk Von Riessen, Wade Inc (John Deere); and Ben Mallen, Trimble
• EARTH OBSERVATION: Innovation and Socio Economic Benefits
  • Includes Rich Leshner, Planet Labs and John Fenvick, Google (Skybox Imaging)
• UAVs Technology, Applications and Policies
• Includes Dan Morgan, Chief Data officer, U.S. Department of Transportation
• Geospatial for Internal Security & Emergency
• Includes Michael Roosa, Senior Policy Advisor, Bureau of Justice Assistance, Department of Justice

Planet Labs donates imagery to the world community

Early this week Will Marshall, Co-Founder and CEO of Planet Labs and previously a scientist at NASA/USRA, traveled to the United Nations Headquarters in New York to represent Planet Labs at the UN Sustainable Development Summit where 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were adopted.  In his speech Marshall announced that Planet Labs was making $60 million worth of its satellite imagery for select regions openly available and accessible to the global community. The imagery will be made available through a Planet Labs initiative called "Open Regions," under a creative commons license (CC BY-SA), and will be directly accessible online. According to Planet Labs’ analysis, the imagery is relevant to 15 of the UN's 17 SDGs. Some examples mentioned in Will Marshall's UN speech are:

• Monitoring deforestation - Planet Labs’ imagery makes it possible to monitor forests every day, to track illegal logging and enable proactive intervention.
• Combating climate change - Planet Lab's imagery can monitor climate change with up-to-date data on the state of the world’s ice caps and carbon stocks.
• Ending hunger and establishing food security - Planet Lab's imagery can measure the health of crops in farmers' fields around the world, and provide vital information to them to increase crop yield.

Planet Labs is unique in the satellite imagery world because it relies on many small, inexpensive satellites rather than a small number of large, expensive satellites.  The constellation of Planet Labs CubeSats (Doves) returns imagery of Earth with a resolution between 3 and 5 meters. The revisit rate, or frequency with which Dove CubeSats pass over a given area, is unprecedented among existing satellite systems in orbit. Planet Labs' goal is to capture an image of the entire Earth every day.