South-west Queensland was hit by a severe flood event in early March 2010 and the town of St George was partially evacuated as floodwaters surged down the Balonne River. But the influx of water was a blessing for the Murray Darling Basin.
The property at Cubbie Station has seen their dams filled with more than welcome water and there is promise of satisfying environmental and commercial demands along the parched system.
Apogee and Infoterra have utilised TerraSAR-X’ s ability to provide high resolution images that are not affected by cloud conditions to map the record breaking flood extents. The first TSX ScanSAR scene over the property was acquired on the 4th March 2010 and further scenes are scheduled to capture conditions at peak levels.
The image below shows the geographic position of the 100km x150km TSX ScanSAR scene acquired on the 4th of March 2010 overlaid on a MODIS image from the same day, highlighting the prevailing cloud cover at the time.
MODIS image over Queensland flooded area overlaid with a TerraSAR-X ScanSAR scene
Below are three subsets of the TSX image over Cubbie station and surrounding areas with evidence of the early stages of the flooding mapped in Blue, that is already filling water storages.(for large images, please visit Our Spatial Planet.
TerraSAR-X subset over Cubbie Station showing flooded areas, Queensland
TerraSAR-X subset over Cubbie Station showing flooded areas, Queensland
TerraSAR-X subset over Cubbie Station showing flooded areas, Queensland
Apogee Imaging International will be attending and presenting to the APCO (Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials)-Australia Emergency Services and Public Safety event held in Melbourne at Melbourne Convention Exhibition Centre on the 15th to 17th March 2010.
This event will provide professionals with the latest innovations and developments in emergency response technology, surveillance technology, communications and remote-sensing services for emergency.
This event will be a great opportunity for networking with decision-makers from all around the world in all areas of public safety communication and will feature an outstanding educational forum with presentations on homeland security and public safety.
Please come and see Apogee at booth number 4. We are looking forward to meeting with you to discuss your requirements and demonstrate our capabilities.
The SPAA conference (Southern Precision Agriculture Association http://spaa.com.au) held in Clare, South Australia this year attracted a wide range of growers and consultants involved in Precision Agriculture. Apogee Imaging International was present at this event and John Douglas, Managing Director, as well as several of Apogee’s staff presented and demonstrated FarmImage®, a new online spatial management system for agribusiness, in association with Landmark. A number of national and international speakers representing all agribusiness industries presented a highly interesting program focused on soil moisture monitoring, integrated precision Viticulture, and practical use of ground and remote-sensed sensors.
John Douglas presenting FARMIMAGE(R) at the SPAA conference in Clare
The event was sponsored by leading companies involved in precision farming in Australia and booths from each sponsor gave visitors an impressive overview of products and services. Many leading companies were sponsoring this event with new guidance, flow & application control devices available for demonstration purposes.
It was great to have such a diversified group of people sharing their knowledge, experience and skills in precision agriculture and we are looking forward to the next SPAA conference.
The largest disaster of 2010 so far continues to unfold. Aftershocks are hitting Haiti. Understanding the dynamics of the fault is crucial for planning evacuation and relief operations. TerraSAR-X can image the whole affected area independent of cloud conditions. Using correlation matching DLR extracted the east-west and north-south shifts. The results show upto 2.8m shift along the fault line.
The openlayers project and telascience have started putting together a web portal for the data flowing through from the disaster charter and other sources. EROS imagery shown in the previous post will be available soon.
On Tuesday 12th January 2010, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck the Caribean country of Haiti.The epicenter was only 10 miles away from the capital Port-au-Prince. 75000 people have been confirmed dead and the death toll is likely to rise. Infrastructures have been hit badly and and satellites images show the extent of the damage. Multiple images from ImageSat International EROS-A and EROS-B satellites are being acquired over the devasted area of Port-au-Prince and surounding areas. The images are donated to any agencies which can benefit from them. Please contact Apogee for any requests. The extent of the damage as well as thousands of people gathered in public squares can be seen in the subset images below.
Overview of Haiti and location of the epicenter of the 7.0 magnitude Earthquake which has struck near the capital Port-au-Prince
Port-au-Prince international airport where relief workers are setting up temporary shelters around the runway.
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Cathedral before and after the earthquake. �
Presidential Palace before and after the earthquake.
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People gathered in public squares before and after the earthquake.
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Buildings before and after the earthquake.
Please contact Apogee for any requests regarding imagery over the affected areas of Port-au-Prince.
A giant iceberg known as B17B broke off Antartica’s Ross Ice Shelf 10 years ago and had drifted 1,700 kilometers from Australia’s coast. Since December, the iceberg has been slowly breaking up and melting due to warmer water.
The image below has been acquired with TerraSAR-X on the 15th December and clearly shows the main iceberg breaking up into fragments.
A recent image taken by NASA from the EO-1 satellite can be seen at:
With the advent of easy 64 bit computing and multi-core CPU’s time has come for every company to have its own super-computer, not just research groups in Universities. The nature of data processing in Remote sensing lends itself easily to parallelization. Most of the imagery data is multi-band 2-dimensional rasters, 3-dimensional matrices from a mathematicians viewpoint. From a computational task the major processes of geometry correction, spectral correction, collation of frames and compression for transmission can be done on a pixel by pixel or block by block basis allowing segmentation of the tasks to multiple processors.
With the uptake of more projects single machine based processing became an issue at Apogee and solutions were sought for continuously running general processing on large high resolution datasets. The processing chains have been automated and set up on a beowulf server farm with quad-core CPU’s and identical diskless systems to run in parallel using a Message Passing Interface (MPI) or Parallel Python. This solution enables us to quickly finish larger projects, serve more clients and develop more elaborate processing, since computational complexity is not a barrier any more. The processes are also more fault tolerant due to the use of a more stable and syncronized operating environment with regular checkpointing for major outage recovery.
Satellite images from the 10th and 11th September show that the oil leak is much closer from the East Timor coast than expected…
Over calm water, the radar signal shows up black and differenciation between oil and water is therefore difficult as is the case in the ENVISAT data from the 8th and 11th September. Having multiple observations resolves this issue.
Compilation of different Satellite images (COSMO-SkyMed, TerraSAR-X, MODIS, ENVISAT) taken between the 28/08/09 and the 08/09/09 over the West Atlas oil spill in the Timor sea.
A significant amount of oil from an oil and gas rig in the Timor Sea has been leaking since the 21st of August 2009.
Apogee has tasked multiple SAR satellites to obtain images over the disaster area since the 29th August. Radar satellites are the most efficient method to monitor large areas, and are well known to delineate the presence of oil on the ocean. This is due to the suppression of capillary waves resulting in a smoother surface where oil is present and a different appearance within the image.
On the 29th August 2009, a Cosmo-Skymed ScanSAR Wide data has been acquired and shows the extent of the oil spill.
Cosmo-skymed data intgrated into Apogee’s Maritime Surveillance Software DEEPBLUE showing the location of the oil spill.
On the 30th August 2009 , a TerraSAR-X ScanSAR image was acquired which clearly shows the extent of the oil spill around the rig.
Containment and recovery operation is underway and oil spill dispersants are being used over the area. The 3 colours on this ScanSAR image are the result of a classification process and show different oil concentration levels on the water.
Classification of oil concentration on the 30th August 2009.
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