Research in Earth Observation

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Research in Earth Observation

• Prof. Mike Barnsley,
• Department of Geography,
• University of Wales Swansea.

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Outline of Presentation

• Inferring land surface biophysical and
  biochemical properties from space
• Universities and industry in partnership
  CHRIS/PROBA a SmallSat mission
• Identifying the brown field sites mapping and
  monitoring land use within urban areas.

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Global Environmental Monitoring

• Involved in several international satellite
  sensor missions (NASA-MODIS, CNES-SPOT4,
  CNES/NASDA-POLDER).

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Inferring Surface Biochemistry
Reflectance spectrum for a single green leaf
showing absorption by chlorophyll at 0.5?m and
0.65?m
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Scaling-up Leaf to Canopy
In radiative terms, vegetation canopies do not
behave simply as big leaves. Errors will be
introduced if we assume leaf-scale relationships
hold at the canopy scale. The magnitude of these
errors will be a function of the canopy geometry.
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Determining SurfaceBiophysical Properties
Nadir
Forward scatter
Backscatter
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Surface Biophysical Properties
NIR,Red, Green
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Surface Biophysical Properties
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Surface Biophysical Properties
Isotropic reflectance parameter (spectral albedo
at 865nm) derived from POLDER on ADEOS data.
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University/Industry Partnership

• MVA approach is being exploited for agricultural
  monitoring through ESA Small-Sat project in
  partnership with Sira Electro-Optics Ltd, plus
  NRSC, Logica and Zeneca.

CHRIS (Compact High Resolution Imaging
Spectrometer) will be mounted on the PROBA
satellite (PROject for On-Board Autonomy).
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University/Industry Partnership

• First test of the new breed of smaller, faster,
  cheaper satellites.
• Good example of U.K. science budget leveraging
  large ESA spend.
• Transforming scientific research into
  economically-viable, commercial applications of
  Earth Observation

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Urban Brown Field Sites

• Need to identify urban brown field sites
  suitable for re-development for the projected 4
  million new homes required by 2016.
• Exploit new generation of ultra-high spatial
  resolution, commercially-operated satellite
  sensors
• BUTwe need to develop new data-processing
  techniques appropriate to the scale/resolution of
  the data sets that these sensors will produce.

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Urban Brown Field Sites

• Working jointly with OS, Cardiff and Bristol
  CCC
• Infer land use from automated structural pattern
  analysis of land cover parcels identified in
  digital images.

25cm image for part of Bristol.
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Urban Brown Field Sites

• Developing graph-theoretic, structural
  pattern-recognition system to infer land use from
  the morphological properties of, and
  spatial/structural relations between, discrete
  land cover parcels.

Land cover parcels
Adjacency graph
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Urban Brown Field Sites

• OS interested in potential of system to assist in
  identification of new developments and in
  automated map updating.

OS-derived buildings
Image-derived buildings
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Other EO Research at Swansea

• Biodiversity of coastal dune systems using
  imaging spectrometers and LiDAR
• Momentum and mass budgets of surging glaciers
  using interferometric SAR
• The carbon cycle of boreal forests using SAR
• Scaling and generalization in the production of
  global land cover maps from EO.