Using NASA satellite data, scientists have produced a first-of-its kind map that details the height of the world’s forests. Although there are other local- and regional-scale forest canopy maps, the new map is the first that spans the entire globe based on one uniform method.

The work — based on data collected by NASA’s ICESat, Terra, and Aqua satellites — should help scientists build an inventory of how much carbon the world’s forests store and how fast that carbon cycles through ecosystems and back into the atmosphere. Michael Lefsky of the Colorado State University described his results in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Lefsky used data from a laser technology called LIDAR that’s capable of capturing vertical slices of surface features. It measures forest canopy height by shooting pulses of light at the surface and observing how much longer it takes for light to bounce back from the ground surface than from the top of the canopy. Since LIDAR can penetrate the top layer of forest canopy, it provides a fully-textured snapshot of the vertical structure of a forest — something that no other scientific instrument can offer.

“LIDAR is unparalleled for this type of measurement,” Lefsky said, noting it would have taken weeks or more to collect the same amount of data in the field by counting and measuring tree trunks that LIDAR can capture in seconds.

He based his map on data from more than 250 million laser pulses collected during a seven year period. That may sound like an enormous amount of data, but each pulse returns information about just a tiny portion of the surface. Overall, the LIDAR offered direct measurements of 2.4 percent of the Earth’s forested surfaces.

Google Earth version of the global map (The map of the forest height is more detailed for the United States) can be download : http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=44717

Source: NASA First-of-its-Kind Map Depicts Global Forest Heights

Enter the 8-Band Challenge to get free imagery for your research and a chance to win $5,000 and present your findings at Geospatial World Forum in January!.

DigitalGlobe will make 8-band imagery available to qualifying researchers to study the impact of using this data for:

- Land Use/Land Cover Analysis
- Environmental Mapping and Monitoring
- Coastal Habitad Mapping
- Feature Extraction….

Source: DigitalGlobe

Precise to a few centimetres
This first elevation model shows amazing views of the icy Russian October Revolution Island, the largest island of the Severnaya Zemlya group. Details such as the height of the glaciers and individual moving ice sheets have never before been measured from space with a precision of a few centimetres. In addition, the height of a vast ice cap in the centre of the island is mapped accurately. Until now, there has been no data of this quality about this strange world. The Shuttle Radar Topography Mission, the international mission by NASA, DLR and other space agencies that flew in 2000, could not observe these polar regions – they are very important for climate research.

Source: DLR

www.openstreetmap.com

The first service, a regional geographic portal, offers access to national maps posted on the Internet by more than thirty institutions in South America. Each of these institutions has implemented an interactive mapping service, a mechanism to provide access to their maps and other geographic data on the Internet. This is the first geographic portal that offers access to geographical data from institutions throughout South America.

The second service, a Topographic Processing Service (TPS), allows producing value-added maps and performing geographic analysis derived from the highest resolution relief map (or digital elevation model) available for South America. The TPS helps create supranational seamless maps on slope, aspect, shaded relief and drainage basins, among others; and to produce altitude profiles and visibility analysis for any selected point or area of South America. Data derived from the analysis are automatically generated on the Internet and are freely accessible. This is the first regional service that provides data derived from the 30 meter SRTM elevation model which is implemented in the world.

The third application developed by GeoSUR is an interactive map of South America that offers access to a wide range of spatial information, such as regional road maps, relief, settlements, hydrography, protected areas and ecosystems, as well as satellite imagery and infrastructure project information. The three above applications have been developed with technical support from the EROS Center.

Source: www.gsdi.org

This thermal image from ASTER covers an area measuring 60 by 240 kilometers (37 by 147 miles), most of it over the Gulf of Mexico. The coldest surfaces appear dark, and the warmest appear white. The city of Pascagoula, Miss., is visible in the upper right corner; at night the land is colder (darker) than the Gulf waters. Offshore islands below Pascagoula also appear dark compared to the surrounding ocean. The black dots and patches over the Gulf waters are small clouds, particularly in the southern half of the image. The thickest parts of the oil spill appear as dark grey, filamentous masses in the southern part of the image, extending off the bottom. Other dark-light swirl patterns are water currents where different temperature water masses are visible.

Source: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov – Image credit : NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team

For more information about ASTER image : http://asterweb.jpl.nasa.gov/

• Sensor OLI (Operational Land Imager)
• Nominal spacecraft altitude 705 kilometers
• Narrower band ranges augmented with two additional bands
• Absolute geodetic accuracy 65 meters. Relative geodetic accuracy 25 meters (excluding terrain effects). Geometric accuracy 12 meters or better (including compensation for terrain effects
• 400 scenes per day. 150 more than Landsat 7
• 9 bands (thermal band excluded and two new bands including)

The Charter, an international initiative aimed at providing satellite data free of charge to those affected by disasters anywhere in the world, immediately began re-tasking their satellites to get the data urgently needed.

Data are being collected by various satellites including Japan’s ALOS, CNES’s Spot-5, the U.S.’s WorldView, QuickBird and GeoEye, Canada’s RADARSAT-2, China’s HJ-1-A/B and ESA’s ERS-2 and Envisat.

Source: ESA (European Spatial Agency) -  www.esa.int / SERTIT (Regional Service of Image Traitement and Remote Sensing) – www.sertit.u-strasbg.fr

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Después del terremoto de magnitud 7.0 que sacudió Haití el 12 de enero, las agencias internacionales solicitaron datos satelitales de la región a la “Carta Internacional” sobre el “Espacio y las Grandes Catástrofes”.

“La Carta” es una iniciativa internacional  que tiene como objetivo proporcionar datos satelitales gratuitos de zonas afectadas por desastres en cualquier parte del mundo, iniciando inmediatamente la reprogramación de sus satélites para conseguir datos con la mayor frecuencia posible.

Actualmente, datos están siendo colectados por varios satélites, entre los que se incluyen ALOS de Japón, Spot-5 de la Agencia Espacial Francesa (CNES), los satélites estadounidenses WorldView, QuickBird y GeoEye, el canadiense RADARSAT-2 y los satélites de la ESA Envisat y ERS-2.

Fuente: ESA (Agencia Espacial Europea ESA) -  www.esa.int / SERTIT (Servicio Regional de Procesamiento de Imágenes y Teledetección) – www.sertit.u-strasbg.fr

With airborne Lidar mapping now well accepted as a cost effective and accurate method of creating large-area topographic maps or digital elevation models, the new rapidly emerging technology to watch is mobile Lidar mapping.

The advantages of Mobile Mapping are: the speed of data acquisition and the recording of “real world”, geo-referenced information; increased efficiency and productivity as many different forms of data are acquired simultaneously rather than requiring separate survey missions; the accuracy of the data, resulting from the high resolution and precision of the sensors, which can be verified very quickly on site.  Mobile Mapping offers flexibility as these systems can be mounted on a variety of platforms, including cars, trucks, railroad “high-rail” vehicles and even boats.

source: www.gim-international.com

• Cloud Computing
• Virtualization
• Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
• Open Source Software (OSS)
• Geospatial Technology

Source: www.gpsworld.com