While waiting for the upcoming news on the next RACE challenge, expected on 1 August, let’s take a look at the March challenge winner story. Challenge #1 question was: How does the pandemic affect shipping traffic and related air and water quality? Alessandro Cimbelli, the selected winner, a technologist at ISTAT (Italian institute of statistics), …
How to combine socio-economic indicators into one impact metric across European regions? The COVID19 pandemic strongly affected economy and society across Europe, with an impact varying over time and by country, depending on structure of the economy and regional characteristics. This challenge looks at the socio-economic sector, with a particular focus on production, trade …
How does the pandemic affect shipping traffic and related air and water quality? The COVID19 pandemic strongly affected global logistics and supply chains which primarily rely on shipping for moving goods and commodities around the globe. Reduced demand for crude oil, a consequence of drastic reductions in transportation, led to queues of oil tankers …
How can EO contribute to monitoring and understanding the impacts of the pandemic on the economy and the environment? Replying to this question has been the objective of the Rapid Action on COVID19 with Earth Observation (RACE) initiative since its launch, in spring 2020, by ESA and the European Commission (EC). The investigation is ongoing …
A new advanced InSAR processing service called SNAPPING (Surface motioN mAPPING) has just been deployed in the Geohazard Exploitation Platform (GEP). The potential of the service is illustrated in the context of the Samos (Greece) M7.0 seismic event of 30 October 2020. Based on the open source SNAP toolbox and StaMPS software, the …
ESA actively promotes uptake of state-of-the-art ICT platform resources for EO exploitation by European research activities. This uptake phase is supported by opportunities to access these resources free-at-point-of-use, implemented via vouchers mechanisms. Today two initiatives are in place, one sponsored by ESA, one sponsored by the European Commission allowing research activities to request vouchers that can …
Four out of the best weekly contributions to the Custom Script Contest – focused on the support of space assets during the COVID-19 crisis – were invited to upscale their ideas to the European level. Two of them have now been selected for integration into the RACE (Rapid Action Coronavirus Earth observation) dashboard. The winning …
Congratulations to Henrik Fisser, whose Truck detection – Sensing trade from space has been awarded the first prize for the Euro Data Cube COVID-19 edition of the custom script contest. The idea exploits reflectance patterns of long moving vehicles, such as trucks, in Sentinel-2 images. While trucks are essentially too small to be recognised as …
Coders, entrepreneurs, scientists, designers, storytellers, makers, builders, artists, and technologists are invited to participate in a virtual hackathon on May 30-31 dedicated to putting open data to work in developing solutions to issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic. NASA, ESA (European Space Agency) and JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) are contributing unique capabilities ranging from …
In just a few weeks we have already received some great ideas and see that a large community can contribute significantly with this tool – a BIG THANKS for that !!! The European Space Agency (ESA), in coordination with the European Commission, has decided to offer an additional opportunity for some selected ideas by European …
