Earth Observation Archive - Blog

Navigating the Seas with MariGeoRoute: A Weather Routing Tool for Energy Optimized Shipping

July 18, 2024 by Maneesha Premasiri

Filed Under: 52°North, Earth Observation Tagged With: MariData, weather routing, WeatherRoutingTool

In today’s fast-paced maritime industry, optimizing routes and ensuring efficient navigation is more critical than ever. The MariGeoRoute Weather Routing Tool (WRT) is an innovative open-source routing solution initially developed in the research project MariData. With its advanced capabilities there is great potential for further development and application in real-world scenarios. In this blog post, we’ll explore how it works, its benefits and provide a practical example of planning a route. Let’s dive in!

Setting Sail with the MariGeoRoute WRT

Imagine you’re the fleet manager of a global shipping company. Your task is to ensure that your vessels take the most efficient routes, saving time and fuel while ensuring safety. This is where the MariGeoRoute WRT comes into play.

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Flood detection using Sentinel 1 images

November 5, 2021 by Sufian Zaabalawi Leave a Comment

Filed Under: 52°North, Earth Observation Tagged With: EO, Flood detection, ML, water recognition, Water Surface Classification

In a previous Blog-post, we implemented an application to identify water surfaces using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images produced by radar-based sensors. The main advantage of using this type of sensor is that it can overcome the limitation of optical spectral sensors in the case of clouds and weather conditions that block spectral reflectance. An example is the Sentinel 1 satellite, which uses microwaves that can penetrate haze, light rain and clouds to illuminate the earth and measure the backscatter and travel time of the transmitted waves reflected by objects on the ground. It has the clear advantage of being far less dependent on the weather and can acquire images at night to obtain near-real-time information and monitor the earth over a large area. Furthermore, SAR images provide a lower backscatter reflectance for water surfaces as compared to non-water surfaces. This significant difference can be used to distinguish water surfaces and other land areas.

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Water Surface Classification in Landsat 8 and Sentinel 1 Images

September 28, 2021 by Sufian Zaabalawi Leave a Comment

Filed Under: 52°North, Earth Observation Tagged With: Deep Learning algorithm, Landsat, Sentinel, Water Surface Classification

Deep Learning algorithms are being used more often to process remote sensing data. Data captured from satellite platforms requires reliable and generalized methods to periodically extract and analyse useful information. Environmental planners are becoming increasingly interested in applications, such as land cover mapping ranging from urban development to crop detection, to monitor climate change and wildfires.

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WaCoDiS & CODE-DE: The future (of Earth Observation data processing) is now

April 16, 2021 by Sebastian Drost Leave a Comment

Filed Under: 52°North, Earth Observation, Geoprocessing Tagged With: CODE-DE, docker, Earth Observation, mFUND, Microservice, OGC WPS, WaCoDiS

Efficient Earth Observation data processing relying on CODE-DE

In April 2020, a relaunch of the Copernicus Data and Exploitation Platform – Deutschland (CODE-DE) was announced. This was a big deal, since the second generation of the CODE-DE platform should now offer public access to the long awaited online processing environment. At this time, our WaCoDiS research project was in its final term and we were ready to validate our developments as part of a pre-operational deployment. Thus, the relaunch of CODE-DE just came at the right time.

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