Remotely sensed data provide a snapshot in time, and thus seem perfect for a task such as parking-capacity inventory. Until recently, however, remote-sensing systems suffered from shortcomings that made them ill-suited to the task: satellite imagery lacked sufficient spatial resolution, and aerial imagery was never cost effective for small areas.
Ball Aerospace has been actively developing its TotalSight Flash LiDAR system for the last six years. Flash LiDAR works much like a traditional digital camera, with the sensor taking a range and intensity snapshot with each laser pulse.
Ambitious statewide use of LiDAR is a natural progression for the technology, as the realism of such data dramatically improves human understanding.
Basic crop scouting from drones provides a major improvement over how field surveys previously were done, and it's the primary driver for drone-technology adoption. Crop scouts traditionally were employed to walk farm fields to monitor crop condition. This is hot, time-consuming work, and crop scouts have difficulty visiting even a small percentage of a whole field, easily missing problem areas.
Prodigious phytoplankton growth can be toxic to an ecosystem, suffocating marine life (by depleting the oxygen in the sea) or producing toxins that can sicken and sometimes kill the creatures (including humans) who ingest them.
By Chris Crosiar, Office of Basic and Applied Research, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (www.nga.mil), Springfield, Va. In my experience as a research and development scientist at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, I recall a time when the mention of...
By Steve Cole, public affairs officer, Earth Science Division, NASA (www.nasa.gov), Washington, D.C. Four new NASA Earth-observing missions are collecting data from space—with a fifth newly in orbit—after the busiest year of NASA Earth science launches in more...
When looking at all the coming changes to the geospatial technology tools and inputs that are emerging and immediately over the horizon, there's a mixed feeling of excitement and trepidation. How will all of these new data-collection platforms, workflows and analytics impact the world of today's practitioners as well as the vendor community?
During the last several years, numerous companies announced their intention to launch low-cost Earth-observation satellite systems, most of which will be constellations of satellites. This implies a significant increase in the amount of Earth-observation data being collected and a growing number of supply choices, but what are the industry implications?
With at least one image of every location on Earth per season for 43 years, the Landsat data archive contains more than 50 trillion pixels. So how could you put all of that imagery to use in discovering and monitoring subtle changes on Earth? One answer lies in the...
