Wednesday, September 30. 2009

GPS in the Snow

Recall that one of the errors in GPS is called "mulitipath error" - that's when the signal from the GPS satellite bounces off something before it gets to the receiver, making its path artificially "longer." Its noise for most applications, but in fact is valuable in ... wait for it... measuring snow depth. Researchers at the University of Colorado, Boulder, looking to learn about the impact of soil moisture on the echoes found their experiment in the middle of a snow storm. That lead to a startling realization: "The snow slowed the reflected GPS signals, and the delay corresponded to the snow's depth..." That in turn led to a method to accurately measure snow fall in real time. The team's paper, in Geophysical Research Letters appeared this month.

- ScienceNow

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in GPS, Remote Sensing at 07:24 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0) |

Wednesday, September 23. 2009

Sungevity Gets More Funding, Executives

Sungevity, a company that uses satellite imagery and obliques to short cut the process of determining the potential for solar panels and providing a quote for an installation recently tapped into $6 million from investors and hired several new executives. More players are entering the solar panel installation space and the use of the imagery, which ideally cuts costs and time to install, distinguishes Sungevity, at least so far!

previous APB coverage

- VentureBeat

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Remote Sensing at 08:01 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

Tuesday, September 22. 2009

DigitalGlobe's Jill Smith on Cloud Computing

The second key enabler [to removing barriers to imagery use] is the availability of cloud computing to distribute our products. With the geospatial cloud we can offer a platform with high performance computing and bring down cost. Our customers can therefore access imagery through various formats, immediately. We can also offer additional services such as change detection or feature identification that leverage this geospatial cloud.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Remote Sensing, DigitalGlobe, Cloud Computing at 08:12 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

Tuesday, September 15. 2009

NASA Landsat Data Key in METRIC Water Management App

Update: it won the American Government Award! (PR)

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The Idaho Department of Water Resources and the University of Idaho developed METRIC for Mapping EvapoTranspiration with High Resolution and Internalized Calibration, back in 2000. Now it's in use by 11 states and is a finalist for a Harvard Kennedy School Innovations in American Government Awards.

The program got even cheaper to use when NASA made the Landsat imagery free last year. And, after input from Western politicians, NASA has decided to include $100 million thermal infrared sensor needed to record surface temperature in the next Landsat satellite, scheduled to launch in 2012.

- Washington Post

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Remote Sensing at 06:00 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

Wednesday, September 2. 2009

Analysts Predict Impact of WorldView-2 Launch

And the news is good per the experts:

- DigitalGlobe will gain 10% in marketshare (it has 45% now)
- GeoEye will technically lose marketshare, but not revenues
- DigitalGlobe growth may be in excess of 3 percent with revenue growth of 35 percent in 2010
- Both companies will do well with upcoming federal procurements for imagery

- Reuters

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Remote Sensing, DigitalGlobe, Geospatial Business at 06:54 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

Tuesday, September 1. 2009

Podcast: OGC Gets into Real Estate, DigitalGlobe Readies Bird for Daily Revisits

Our editors ask: Why is the Open Geospatial Consortium hooking up with the Open Standards Consortium for Real Estate and what should potential users of DigitalGlobe's Worldview-2 satellite data be pondering before its launch planned for October?

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Oracle, Standards, Remote Sensing, Sensors, Directions on the News Podcast, DigitalGlobe, Geospatial Business, Satellite Imagery, Google Earth, Cloud Computing at 06:00 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |