Remote Sensing Tidbits
Europe’s Smos satellite launched last year has a job to do: measure soil moisture and ocean salinity from space. It uses an 8m-wide interferometric radiometer, and early data presented at the European Space Agency’s Living Planet Symposium in Norway suggest it’s working. Still, it’s not perfect, there are areas such as rain forests and snow-covered areas where scientists are not confident of the data.
- BBC
How often should we fly the county? In Auglaize County, Ohio, the plan had been every 4 years, but that’s changed.
The plan now is to conduct a new flight and use that data for county mapping every five or six years.
“Doing one every other year just isn’t justified,” Reinhart said. “We want to be able to show a difference in what has transpired during that time.”
The county had to postpone flights when funds, derived from housing sales, dropped. But with funds coming back in, and a deal with the state, the county plans for a 2011 flight for about $70,000 out of county coffers.
A blimp is on the way from Arizona to the Gulf Coast to spot oil for clean up. How will it do the spotting?
The primary means for locating oil will be by the visual observation of workers aboard the blimp, Sareault said. Additional sensors, which may take several days to install, may be added when they arrived [sic] on July 12. Other aircraft already have electro-optical, infrared and radar sensors onboard.
- IB Times via reader Kevin
