Dr Vanessa Lawrence CB, Senior Strategic Geospatial Global Advisor and Director, Location International Ltd demonstrates how geospatial information is assisting around the globe to provide greater insights into global sustainability and its societal impact. There’s some interesting points that Vanessa makes during her presentation:
- The way we receive data has changed and what happens around the world in 60 seconds by way of data technology utilization – you need to see the slide to take it all in;
- 10,000 changes are made to the master map of Great Britain every day by the Ordnance Survey;
- Geospatial data has helped in Rwanda to increase the number of registered land parcels from 40,000 in 2009 to 10.6m in 2014;
- 60% of all coffee in Rwanda is produced by rural smallholders who have income levels below £1.9p a day. New technology has enabled them to increase their income by up to 40% by utilitsing weather data;
- £23.5bn is the cost of illegal fishing each year. The Pew Charitable Trust and the Satellite Applications Catapult are working together to address this issue and there's an interesting video outlining the project in Vanessa's presentation.
Vanessa also highlights the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and how satellite information is supporting and enabling these goals. Satellite images of Haiti illustrated the devastating impact of the recent hurricane on the country.
Ralph Cordey, Earth Observation Key Account Manager at Airbus Defence and Space outlines the new ways in which we’ve been remote sensing the earth since the 1990s.
Ralph highlights that 2016 was the 25th anniversary of the ERS-1 satellite which was launched to exploit microwave technology. It measures sea surface temperatures, wind speeds over the oceans and atmosphere composition.
Ralph goes onto to highlight the development of remote satellite systems since then:
- SMOS launched in 2009 – a radio telescope that looks down at the earth;
- GOCE launched in 2009-2013 – measures the gravitational field of the earth and the mass changes in the ice caps;
- Cryosat 2010 – a pair of radar altimeters to track and look at properties of the ice in the Arctic winter sea ice;
- Swarm 2013 – consists of three satellites looking at the earth’s geomagnetic atmosphere;
- Aeolus to be launched in 2017 will exploit lidar technology, this is a conventional satellite carrying telescope with laser sources and sensors to measure winds in the earth’s atmosphere at different levels above the earth’s surface.
The developments in the Copernicus satellites are also outlined from Sentinel 1 which will be in operation until 2030 through to Sentinel 6 which will be Europe’s contribution to the long term measurement of the ocean’s surfaces.