Alastair and I reviewed the year on the #scenefromabove podcast, you can listen to it below. Jump to the 12minute mark if you want to listen instead.
This is my attempt at capturing 2020 in 3minutes. Start your clocks!
Here comes 2020, (a Shapefile is more than one file). Earth Observation 2.0, the Analytical Earth – is here? January Christoph Rieke nails UAV landcover classification using fastai – Sentinel Hub does the same with Satellites BOOM – we can all go home. February Sentinel5P (more coming) is available as a COG, Satellilogic launches new satellites: Marie and Sophie (sound the trumpets), GEDI products appear online and Qiusheng Wu releases GEE notebooks (as well over 40 GEE Tutorials throughout the year) – Double trumpets! ABC publishes its take on satellite imagery and wildfires, Professor Phil Lewis wins the newton prize and Patrick Gray shows us how to use deep learning for Oysters. The Global Pandemic.
March and Emil Cherrington tells us about Sevir, ICEEYE (EO company of the year?) tells us about SAR video and later in the year secures series C funding. Imagery from Syria tells a sobering story. In April Charlotte tells us about all things Geological and remotely sensed from Norway, AWS starts hosting Himawari-8 data and Jonathan Amos writes up the Grace Mission and the measurement of melting in Greenland. Sentinel5P (here is comes again) displays in stunning detail the impact of the lock-downs across the world on the reduction in Atmospheric gases! by the end of the year we are kind of back to ‘normal’ again as we continue to p*** in the margins on climate change. Awesome-Earth-Observation code starts! Double Trumpets!
May, May! Only into May and we get cracking on drones. PWC reports space and covid, there appears to be a growth model. Open LiDAR for SaoPaulo blows us away, the stunning visualisation of imagery on the web becomes a theme for the year. June. Hello to Hayley who tells us about sentinel 3 and training whilst we show our ignore about the Oceans.
Still in June STAC goes to 1.0 beta, its a big year for STAC and several events and milestones are achieved in 2020. FOSS4G UK takes place and there is a great deal of EO content, Sean Gorman wins the day with Pixel8. Planet announces multiple images per day. Into July Methane detection hits the news GHGSat are having a big year launching more satellites and planning more for 2022 and getting more funding. Hold up, did I say Planet doing multiple images a day, double trumpets, Its later confirmed in October skysat will get 7-12 images a day. Watch out for Legion and Neo – the incumbents will return and eat the market in 2022 – or so they hope. Back in July geopandas comes out with an important release supporting PostGIS (and alot more).
Summer 2020 relax have a socially distanced break, take it easy. Nothing happens in summer right. Until bang end of August cloud Native geospatial day is announced and goes on to be one of the most successfully and transformative online events of the year. September – Sentinel Hub start blogging on data fusion. We get overwhelmed by Geoplatforms.
October is a busy month. KSAT and Airbus and Planet come together on a massive forestry project. And the most important open remote sensing plugin (semi automatic plugin for QGIS) starts supporting sentinel 1 and geostationary satellites! Triple trumpets. We talk Disasters with Dave, Sentinel 2 becomes free on AWS again and its a COG, so you know what to do right? Radiant Earth foundation has a crack at the state of ML for EO and totally nails it.
November and Joe tells us market place models are a bad idea (sorry terrible idea) and its time to go deep on problems. Licensing and imagery are still a mess of a mess. Geo4Good, came and went online. Google Continues to throw resources at GEE. Earth Null school has a upgrade, and the 30 day map challenge doubles its audience and blows the mapping world wide open. Collaboration is the way forward guys. Awesome-Earth-Observation hits 500 resources. Keiko tells her inspiring programming story. Maxar offers 15cm imagery, penguins get counted using drones and Sentinel 6 is launched. As 2021 approaches no one downloads satellite imagery and a Shapefile is more than just one file.
I’ve missed a ton of stuff, but then 3 minutes.. go and check out https://scenefromabove.podbean.com/ for everything else!
Image credit https://unsplash.com/photos/rBPOfVqROzY
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