The U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF) partnered with Riverside Research to create the Ken Miller Scholarship for Advanced Remote Sensing Applications, which will be awarded for the first of three times in fall 2016.
Satellite Archaeologist Wins 2016 TED Prize
Sarah Parcak, a professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and founder of the Laboratory for Global Observation, won the $1 million TED Prize grant, given annually to a bold leader with a wish to spark global change.
Kathmandu University Students Learn to Use Drones for Disaster Response
Humanitarian UAV Network founder Patrick Meier led a weeklong UAV training mission in Nepal, teaching engineering students at Kathmandu University how to use drones and image-processing software for humanitarian and disaster-response scenarios.
ESA Offering Free Course on EO for Monitoring Climate Change
The European Space Agency (ESA) introduced a free online course, featuring scientists and experts from ESA and other European research centers, to educate people about the science behind Earth observation (EO), and how it can help detect and monitor global climate change.
Compilation of Rare Mars Auroras
The European Space Agency's Mars Express satellite has been able to detect ultraviolet auroras on the planet by combining remote observations with in situ measurements of electrons hitting the atmosphere, and a new study looks at 10 years of such observations.
California's Future Likely Includes More Droughts and Floods
A study published in Nature Communications suggests that El Niño and La Niña weather patterns could lead to at least a doubling of extreme droughts and floods in California later this century. The study also predicts more-frequent extreme weather events.
NASA Satellites Track Historic Hurricane Patricia
Hurricane Patricia made landfall on Oct. 24, 2015, along the southwestern coast of Mexico. NASA's Aqua satellite captured Patricia making landfall, while the Global Precipitation Measurement mission core satellite added up Patricia's high rain totals, which exceeded more than 409 millimeters (16.1 inches) over open waters.
Introducing EONET: The Earth Observatory Natural Event Tracker
NASA recently released the Earth Observatory Natural Event Tracker (EONET), an API that provides a curated collection of natural events as well as a way to link those events to image layers. EONET is expected to enable developers to build their own client applications on top of NASA data.
Ozone Hole Approaches Record Size
Researchers from the German Aerospace Center (DLR) Earth Observation Center (EOC) used Earth-observation satellites to determine that the ozone hole over Antarctica currently extends more than 26 million square kilometers”an area larger than the North American continent. It's approximately 2.5 million square kilometers larger than at the same time in 2014, and just less than the record in 2006, when it was 27 million square kilometers.
Persian Gulf Seen at Night from Space Station
Having reached the halfway mark of his latest one-year mission and overall logging a record-breaking time in space approaching 400 days, U.S. astronaut and commander of the current Expedition 45 crew Scott Kelly has been dazzling audiences with beautiful pictures taken from beyond Earth's atmosphere. He recently photographed the Nile River during a nighttime flyover on Sept. 22, 2015.
