Unmanned Aircraft System Proposal Takes Flight

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26 April 2013 | By Pacific Northwest National Laboratory | 185

A consortium of Washington-based organizations will soon submit the final section of a proposal to site an unmanned aircraft system research and testing facility in central Washington. If successful, the proposal to the Federal Aviation Administration will result in the FAA naming the Pacific Northwest Unmanned Aerial Systems Flight Center as one of six U.S. testing facilities later this year.

Satellite Maps for Agriculture Have Come a Long Way

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16 April 2013 | By The Western Producer | 190

When Faleide was starting out, a few producers kept aerial photos of their fields. Others used government topographical maps to get a form of three dimensional views of their property. However, the latter were used mostly for drainage strategies. Faleide developed some of the first software capable of creating variable rate maps for agricultural applications that used satellite imagery as a platform. Read More

EU to Continue Twin Project for Azerbaijan Land & Cartography Committee

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25 April 2013 | By ABC.AZ | 163

The EU is developing the second twinning project for the State Committee for Land & Cartography of Azerbaijan. The Committee reports that the project is going to continue project "Support to the State Committee for Land and Cartography of Azerbaijan in the creation of modern information system on land registry through process of improvement of appraisal and economic assessment of land in accordance with the EU standards”. Read More

Time and Navigation: How We Found Our Way in the World

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15 April 2013 | By The Atlantic | 180

The newest exhibit at the Smithsonian's Air and Space museum, "Time and Navigation: The Untold Story of Getting from Here to There," opened this weekend, shares the story of human route-charting -- in the seas, in the sky, on the street, and in space. And it's largely a story of failure. The first spaceships we sent to the moon either missed their destination completely or crashed into it. Amelia Earhart was very likely lost due to poor navigation. Columbus and his ships were, famously, misdirected. Read More

1960s Satellite Images Add To Evidence Of Shrinking Sea Ice

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25 April 2013 | By NPR | 156

Scientists have digitized and analyzed imagery taken by one of the first U.S. weather satellites to create a montage showing the extent of polar sea ice in 1964 so they can compare it to more recent satellite photos. The images from low Earth orbit beamed down by the in 1964 reveal that Antarctic ice in September of that year was "substantially higher" than estimates for the period 1979-2000, according to the analysis published in the journal The Cryosphere. Read More

Hurricane Forecast: Above-average Atlantic Season

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15 April 2013 | By USA Today | 176

Top forecasters predict an above-average 2013 Atlantic hurricane season, with 18 tropical storms forecast, of which nine will be hurricanes. This comes on the heels of a less-than-stellar forecast in 2012, when nearly twice as many storms formed as had been predicted. A typical year, based on weather records that go back to 1950, has 12 tropical storms, of which seven are hurricanes. Read More

Russian Rockets to Launch European Navigation Satellites

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25 April 2013 | By Russia Beyond the Headlines | 147

Russian rockets will assist in the deployment of the European Galileo navigation satellite network, head of the European Space Agency (ESA) Permanent Mission in Russia Rene Pischel said on Wednesday. Galileo satellites will be mostly launched with Russian vehicles, he said at an international navigation forum in Moscow. Read More

Esri Award May Offer New Study Abroad Opportunity

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15 April 2013 | By The Metropolitan | 185

The Earth and Atmospheric Sciences department at MSU in Denver is initiating a new study abroad program to map rock glaciers in Chile. An award from Esri, a leading provider of geographic information systems software, or GIS, is providing the resources that will make this research possible.

“What we want to do — in a sense — is to change the notion of study abroad,” said Dr. Antonio Bellisario, an assistant professor for the Earth and Atmospheric Sciences department. “We want to link students into the project, not just with the global knowledge, which the students usually get when going to another country, but to enhance it with undergraduate research.” Read More

China Quickly Distributed Satellite Imagery of the Ya'an Earthquake

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25 April 2013 | By China Daily | 168

After the magnitude-8 earthquake hit Wenchuan in Sichuan province in 2008, it took two days for rescuers to get remote sensory images of the affected sites. But on Saturday, when disaster struck Ya'an in the province, images of quake-hit areas were provided the same day. According to Guo Huadong, director of the Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth, Chinese Academy of Sciences, a huge amount of airborne remote sensing data from Ya'an has now been distributed and shared with 12 ministries and the government of Sichuan. Read More

Citizen Scientists to Help Map Sudden Oak Death Fungus

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15 April 2013 | By San Jose Mercury News | 225

An army of citizen-scientists is being enlisted to help map outbreaks of the Sudden Oak Death fungus killing trees on the California coast and to perhaps control it. The free community outreach campaign kicked off Friday in Santa Cruz. Other sessions will be held in Orinda, Berkeley, San Francisco, Saratoga, Burlingame, Woodside, Atherton and Los Altos Hills. Read More

Remote Sensing Improves Efficiency of Gas Cloud Response

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25 April 2013 | By R&D | 161

Chemical weapons, industrial processing facilities, pipelines, and agricultural sites remain potential sources of hazardous and environmentally damaging chemical compounds. But recent advances in ground-based remote sensing imaging technology, early warning, and real-time monitoring systems can now detect, identify, and map the movement of hazardous gas clouds automatically providing time-sensitive information to system operators, allowing the quick identification and tracking of airborne compounds. Read More

Jeremy Grantham on Population Growth, China and Climate Sceptics

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15 April 2013 | By The Guardian | 190

An interview with Jeremy Grantham, the environmental philanthropist and legendary fund manager, was published in the Guardian on Saturday. The full interview with Grantham has been transcribed to provide detail that the print edition of the Guardian can't provide. Read More

NASA Launches Three Smartphones Into Orbit

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24 April 2013 | By Los Angeles Times | 163

NASA has launched three smartphones into orbit as part of a low-budget, experimental satellite program that uses off-the-shelf components. The three Google-HTC Nexus One smartphones are circling Earth at an altitude of about 150 miles and will burn up on re-entry within the next two weeks, NASA said. The smartphones, which are encased in 4-inch metal cubes, are running the Android operating system. Read More

Digital Road Maps Lack 'Sense of Geography'

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15 April 2013 | By Matt Ball | 177

It comes as no surprise to Patrick Pease that the Iowa Legislature and Department of Transportation plan to print fewer road maps. “I may not be happy about it, but there is a logical reason to it,” said Pease, an associate professor and head of the Geography Department at  the University of Northern Iowa. “I suspect the DOT is correct that fewer people are pulling maps out and using them,” he said. “People are just putting things into their GPS units and moving on.” Read More

UAE High Resolution Earth Observing Satellite to Be Built at Home

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24 April 2013 | By Gulf News | 166

Officials have revealed details of a new earth imaging satellite that will be the first satellite to be completed in the UAE. DubaiSat-3 is scheduled for launch in 2017 after its development is completed in Dubai by the Emirates Institution for Advanced Science and Technology (EIAST). The 330kg-satellite will be able to take high quality images of the UAE and other places — down to a sub-metre resolution of 70cm — from an orbit 600km above Earth. Read More

Russian Space Agency Plans to Almost Double Fleet of Civilian Satellites by 2020

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15 April 2013 | By Russia Beyond the Headlines | 190

There will be 113 economic and scientific satellites in the Russian orbital fleet by 2020, head of the Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) Vladimir Popovkin said in an interview with Rossiyskaya Gazeta. Asked how many satellites are operating in the orbit now he said: "Sixty of those having social, economic and scientific purposes. In two years there should be 95 of them and 113 in 2020." Read More

Fast Database Emerges from MIT Class, GPUs and Student’s Invention

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24 April 2013 | By Data Informed | 172

Todd Mostak’s first tangle with big data didn’t go well. As a master’s student at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard in 2012, he was mapping tweets for his thesis project on Egyptian politics during the Arab Spring uprising. It was taking hours or even days to process the 40 million tweets he was analyzing. Mostak saw immediately the value in geolocated tweets for socio-economic research, but he did not have access to a system that would allow him to map the large dataset quickly for interactive analysis. Read More

12-year-old Girl's Heartfelt Letter Saves B.C. Forest

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14 April 2013 | By CBC News | 181

Olivia Peters is being hailed by environmental activists around the web today for saving an entire Surrey, B.C. forest from bulldozers with her words. The fact that she's in Grade 6 makes her story all the more impressive. In an open letter to Mayor Dianne Watts published in Surrey's Now newspaper last month, 12-year-old Olivia made a strong case against a construction project that would have eliminated a patch of old-growth forest near her family's home. Read More

Soar through Google Earth with Leap Motion

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23 April 2013 | By CNet | 148

Google Earth has been around for years, but thanks to a new integration with Leap Motion, you can now soar through the digital representation of our planet like never before. Starting with the release today of Google Earth 7.1, those who use Leap Motion's hands-free 3D gesture control technology will be able to control the exploration tool, "flying" through the software by simply waving their hands. Read More

Conservation Drones: Changing the Field of Science

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14 April 2013 | By Ensia | 187

Eco-drone pioneer Lian Pin Koh, a tropical ecologist and visiting professor at Princeton University, had an epiphany after slogging through the steaming jungles of Indonesia collecting data on the effects of deforestation on orangutan populations. Rather than spend time and energy lugging heavy equipment through miles of dense foliage surveying the elusive creatures, he thought, why not send a drone aloft to count their nesting sites tucked among the tall trees of the triple canopy? Read More

A Camera On Every Corner? The Surveillance Debate After Boston

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23 April 2013 | By Outside the Beltway | 149

The most important evidence that Federal authorities were able to gather in the wake of last Monday’s attacks in Boston came from the plethora of outdoor surveillance cameras around the area where the attack took place. Indeed, without that evidence, it’s difficult to see how the Tsarnaev brothers could have been identified so quickly without this video evidence. It’s probably understandable then that the attacks in Boston have set off a discussion about the wider use of surveillance cameras in public places. Read More

Climate Change: How a Warming World is a Threat to Our Food Supplies

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14 April 2013 | By The Guardian | 182

Drought, rocketing bread prices, food and water shortages have all blighted parts of the Middle East. Analysts at the Centre for American Progress in Washington say a combination of food shortages and other environmental factors exacerbated the already tense politics of the region. As the Observer reports today, an as-yet unpublished US government study indicates that the world needs to prepare for much more of the same, as food prices spiral and longstanding agricultural practices are disrupted by climate change. Read More

Intelligence Satellite Imagery Declassified for Release

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23 April 2013 | By Secrecy News | 135

An enormous volume of photographic imagery from the KH-9 HEXAGON intelligence satellites was quietly declassified in January and will be transferred to the National Archives later this year for subsequent public release. The KH-9 satellites operated between 1971 and 1984. The imagery they generated should be of historical interest with respect to a wide range of late Cold War intelligence targets but is also expected to support current scientific research on climate change and related fields of inquiry. Read More

Google Chief Urges Action to Regulate Mini-drones

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14 April 2013 | By BBC News | 194

The influential head of Google, Eric Schmidt, has called for civilian drone technology to be regulated, warning about privacy and security concerns. Cheap miniature versions of the unmanned aircraft used by militaries could fall into the wrong hands, he told the UK's Guardian newspaper. Quarrelling neighbours, he suggested, might end up buzzing each other with private surveillance drones. He also warned of the risk of terrorists using the new technology. Read More

Belarusian, Russian Armies to Share Geospatial Data

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23 April 2013 | By Belarusian Telegraph Agency | 126

The joint board of the Belarusian Defense Ministry and the Russian Defense Ministry has approved a draft agreement on mutual exchange of geospatial data between the armed forces of Belarus and Russia. The information was released by Belarusian Defense Ministry Yuri Zhadobin after the session of the joint board on 23 April, BelTA has learned. Read More

NOAA Retires Longest-serving Satellite

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13 April 2013 | By FCW | 196

One of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's longest-operating spacecraft, NOAA-17, has been retired after more than a decade of service, more than tripling its three-year life expectancy and continuing to provide vital data that feeds weather prediction models back on Earth. Launched in 2002 for about $200 million, the polar-orbiting satellite made 55,000 orbits around the globe, logging 1.5 billion miles of travel, all the while collecting massive amounts of valuable temperature, moisture and image data. Read More

10 Things We’ve Learned About the Earth Since Last Earth Day

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21 April 2013 | By Smithsonian | 254

Last year, to celebrate the 42nd Earth Day, we took a look at 10 of the most surprising, disheartening, and exciting things we’d learned about our home planet in the previous year—a list that included discoveries about the role pesticides play in bee colony collapses, the various environmental stresses faced by the world’s oceans and the millions of unknown speciesare still out in the environment, waiting to be found. Read More

Yes, Climate Change Is Worsening U.S. Drought — NOAA Report Needlessly Confuses The Issue

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13 April 2013 | By Think Progress | 328

NOAA has issued a report on a small part of the recent brutal droughts that have hit the United States over the past few years. The report — “An Interpretation of the Origins of the 2012 Central Great Plains Drought” — is needlessly confusing, scientifically problematic, and already leading to misleading headlines. Read More

Environmentalists Appeal for Protection of Sri Lanka Forest Preserve

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21 April 2013 | By Sunday Observer | 145

A sizeable portion of Padaviya Forest reserve is being readied to be apportioned to the Mahaweli Authority for human settlements, the Environment Conservation Trust (ECT) alleged. According to the ECT the extent of the allotted forest is about 12,900 hectares (31,875 acres) and the Forest Department has already prepared the gazette notification. Read More

NASA's Ames Research Center Wins Invention Award for Chemical Detection Sensor

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12 April 2013 | By Azo Sensors | 238

NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., has won the 2012 NASA Government Invention of the Year for a tiny sensor that can detect chemicals in the air. “High Sensitive, Low Power and Compact Nano Sensors for Trace Chemical Detection” was invented by Jing Li and Meyya Meyyappan of NASA Ames, and Yijang Lu of the University of California, Santa Cruz. Read More

Romanian and Indian Offices Map Ulster’s Farms

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21 April 2013 | By Londonderry Sentinel | 163

To improve mapping of Ulster’s farms in order to regulate EU payments was carried out in Romania and India, according to the Agriculture Minister Michelle O’Neill. She explained that Blom UK and DSM Geodata carried out the work from their overseas offices.She also said that a company from the Republic of Ireland carried out a number of spot checks on farms using ‘remote sensing technology’ last year. Read More

Google Map Maker Edit Tools Extended to Cover the UK

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12 April 2013 | By BBC News | 179

Google is expanding its Map Maker edit tools to the UK. The browser-based software allows users to add details about buildings, hiking trails, vegetation and other features to its maps of the country. Suggested additions and amendments are reviewed by other users and the firm's own staff before going live. Read More

Texas Factory Explosion: Satellite Pictures Before and After the Blast

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21 April 2013 | By The Telegraph | 168

Who tries to Outlaw Sustainability? Kansas, that's Who

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12 April 2013 | By MSN | 180

Kansas, a state that made headlines a couple of weeks ago when legislators proposed a bill that would quarantine people with HIV and AIDS, seems to have a knack for negative attention. State lawmakers have now proposed making it illegal to use public funds for anything related to "sustainable development." Read More

Bahrain Plans Agri Training for Farmers

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21 April 2013 | By Trade Arabia | 139

Plans are underway to set up a state-of-the-art training facility for local farmers in a bid to boost Bahrain's agriculture industry, said a top official. It is part of a Municipalities and Urban Planning Affairs Ministry initiative to develop a new agricultural zone in A'ali, which already houses the country's only hay field

Pakistan Decides to Launch Satellite Monitoring of Crops

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12 April 2013 | By Daily Times | 165

The Planning Commission (PC) with the Chinese financial assistance has decided to launch a key project of satellite monitoring of crops in the country to have a reliable data for the true assessment of performance of productive agriculture sector of economy.
At present SUPARCO has the capability of monitoring of crops through satellite of only five major crops and once the PC-1 of the said project is completed and project is executed in the country, it would give a real picture of the agriculture sector which is at present far below the actual performance, officials at PC informed. Read More

Minnesota House Passes $788M Environmental Bill that Boosts Groundwater Monitoring

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21 April 2013 | By TwinCities | 186

The Minnesota House passed an environment, natural resources and agriculture funding package that increases spending on groundwater monitoring and aquatic invasive species enforcement over the next two years. The $788 million spending bill was approved on a 69-61 vote Thursday, April 18. The bill raises fees across the state for water use by more than $6 million a year for increased monitoring efforts. Read More

NOAA's Budget Boost Could Help Weather Satellite Program

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12 April 2013 | By FCW | 140

The Obama Administration's fiscal year 2014 budget proposal increases funding for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration by about $200 million compared to the previous year's enacted funding levels. It would allocate $5.45 billion for the agency charged with forecasting the weather. A hefty $2.2 billion of that requested budget would fund NOAA's National Environmental Satellite Data and Information Services (NESDIS), which maintains the agency's satellite systems, including the aging polar-orbiting satellites that play a critical role in helping the NOAA's National Weather Service forecast the weather. Read More

The Geography of Maternal and Newborn Health

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19 April 2013 | By Huffington Post | 154

How can health geography inform policy discussions and accelerate progress on the UN Secretary-General's Every Woman, Every Child campaign? And how might it support national and international decision-makers who are challenged by the High Level Dialogue on Health in the Post-2015 Development Agenda to "hard-wire" equity into health services? These are just some of the questions that a platform of global partners, led by ICS Integrare and the University of Southampton, is currently studying with catalytic funding from the Norwegian Agency for Development (Norad): "Mapping for maternal and newborn health." Read More

Google Sued By British Street Mapping Service

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12 April 2013 | By Information Week | 158

British online mapping company Streetmaphas launched a court battle against Google, alleging that Google promotes its own maps over those of competitors like itself. Google's actions have made Streetmap's products "harder to find," the Milton Keynes-based company says -- and that its charges reflect on-going European Union antitrust probes into whether Google favors its own services over competitors in search results. Read More

Cartography’s New Golden Age

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19 April 2013 | By Project Sindicate | 301

Today, people are spearheading a second golden age of cartography, which promises to bring equally significant economic and social benefits. Indeed, accurate maps break down geographic barriers, empowering individuals to reach their desired destinations, enabling businesses to reach consumers anywhere, and enriching people’s outlooks. Read More

Jamaica Earmarks $121 Million for Cadastral Mapping and Land Registration Project

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12 April 2013 | By Jamaica Information Service | 169

The Government has allocated some $121 million to boost activities under the Cadastral Mapping and Land Registration project. This is outlined in the 2013/14 Estimates of Expenditure, now before the House of Representatives. The programme seeks to assist persons, particularly rural residents currently occupying lands but not in possession of titles for those properties, to formalise their holdings by providing them with those documents. Read More

Space Harpoon Could Tackle Satellite Debris Problem

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19 April 2013 | By The Engineer | 151

UK engineers have developed a space harpoon that could help tackle the growing problem of space debris orbiting the Earth. The team from satellite firm Astrium wanted to create a relatively simple and therefore reliable way to capture some of the larger pieces of junk from among the thousands currently in orbit, which pose a serious risk to functioning satellites. Read More

Obama Proposes to Launch Satellite Shelved After 2000 Election

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12 April 2013 | By Boston.com | 159

President Barack Obama is proposing dusting off and finally launching an old environmental satellite championed by Al Gore but shelved a dozen years by his 2000 rival George W. Bush. Obama proposed Wednesday spending nearly $35 million in his 2014 budget to refurbish a satellite, nicknamed GoreSat by critics, that’s been sitting in storage after it was shelved in 2001, months after Bush took office. It cost about $100 million by then with NASA’s internal auditors faulting its cost increases. Read More

Remote-Sensing Planes Are Helpful After Disasters

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17 April 2013 | By Chinese Academy of Sciences | 163

Remote-sensing planes should get increased rights to use the airspace after serious natural disasters, so they can play a more effective role in rescue and relief efforts, an expert say. Every second is important after the first 72 hours after a disaster such as an earthquake, and a remote-sensing plane can provide valuable and timely information for the government's decision-making efforts in disaster relief operations, Guo Huadong, director of the Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, says ahead of the fifth anniversary of the 8.0-magnitude earthquake that hit Sichuan province in 2008, causing more than 80,000 dead or missing. Read More

Map: The Countries Most at Risk for a Coup in 2013

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11 April 2013 | By Washington Post | 267

A number of the world’s governments are still at risk of a coup. A few hours before the inauguration, it looked like one of them could be Eritrea, an East African country whose government is so authoritarian and cruel that it’s often compared to North Korea’s. Dissident soldiers seized the country’s state-run TV station, often a first step in a coup, forcing anchors to call for the release of all political prisoners (there are several thousand) before the broadcast abruptly ended. It turns out that, according to Reuters, the soldiers were likely just “low- to mid-ranking soldiers who sought a change in the constitution rather than a coup.” Read More

Facebook Is Said to Hire Apple Maps Executive Amid Mobile Push

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17 April 2013 | By Bloomberg | 219

Facebook Inc. (FB) has nabbed another member of Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s original iPhone team, hiring Richard Williamson, the manager who had led Apple’s mapping efforts, according to people with knowledge of the hire. Williamson joined Facebook in the past couple of weeks to be a manager within its expanding mobile-software group, said two of the people, who declined to be identified because the information isn’t public. Read More

Kazakhstan Plans to Launch First Land Remote Sensing Satellite in Fourth Quarter of 2013

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11 April 2013 | By Trend | 145

Kazakhstan plans to launch the first domestic land remote sensing satellite in the fourth quarter of 2013, Kazkosmos National Space Agency said. "The launch of the first Kazakh land remote sensing satellite of medium resolution is scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2013 from the Yasny launch site in Russia," National Space Agency said. Read More

As Mapping Costs Rise, Waze’s Volunteer Army Will Give It an Edge

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16 April 2013 | By All Things D | 213

Waze CEO Noam Bardin says that the crowdsourced mapping company is going to have some key advantages versus much bigger Google as consumers become increasingly more demanding about the quality and accuracy of their mobile mapping applications. “The companies that are in this space are going find that it’s going to get harder and harder, and that they’re going to have to invest more and more, and the cost of updating your maps is going to increase,” said Bardin. Read More

Google Technology to Help Prevent Deforestation

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11 April 2013 | By Environmental Leader | 139

Google, in partnership with the University of Maryland and the UN Environment Programme, has developed a tool to help prevent deforestation. Global Forest Watch 2.0, which will launch later this year, is an interactive, real-time, forest monitoring system. It uses satellite technology, data sharing and human networks around the world to provide information to better managing forests. Read More