This is a Sentinel-2A image of Aleppo on Dec 22, showing some snow through the clouds. I do not know if this sunny interval lasted a long time, and I wonder if the inhabitants of Aleppo had wished snow for Christmas. I walked through the streets of Aleppo in July 2003 at the end of […]
Sentinel-2A was launched on 23-July-2015 but the routine operations started in July 2016 after the ramp-up phase [1]. Now with the onset of the austral summer, the first Sentinel-2A images of Antarctica are getting available (except for Dome C, which is a calibration site).
Today for lunch I went to a Japanese restaurant near the university with my wife and our oldest son. We discreetly debated whether the owners were actually Japanese because we could recognize some words in Chinese when they were speaking. However, in the main room there was a tapestry of the majestic snow-capped Mount Fuji, […]
On Monday Nov 14 New Zealand was hit by an earthquake of magnitude 7.8. The epicenter was located near Kaikoura on the east coast of the South Island. Yesterday, the NZ Herald published aerial photographs showing tectonic uplift of the seabed of between 2 and 2.5 metres north of Kaikoura [1]. These photos were taken by […]
A Pléiades stereo pair has been acquired on 2016-Oct-01 just a few days after the second glacier collapse in the Aru mountains. The panchromatic band has 0.5 m resolution, which allowed us to generate a post-event digital elevation model of the area. From this digital elevation model and the Pléiades 2 m multispectral imagery, Etienne […]
« The most usual weather in these latitudes is a fresh wind between north west and south west with a cloudy overcast sky » – Phillip Parker King, Sailing Directions for the Coasts of Eastern and Western Patagonia (1832). Patagonia is a beautiful place to visit but campers know that the weather is extremely variable and the […]
In Central Asia former soviet republics, pre-independence water allocation and irrigation system infrastructure were well maintained and operated with massive funding from the central government of the Former Soviet Union. Since independence, the situation has changed dramatically politically, institutionally and technically. Political transition from a planned to a market economy has introduced ‘new’ concepts such […]
The giant ice avalanche that occurred in Tibet on 17 July 2016 and killed 9 people [1] urged scientists to scrutinize every available data to understand what caused such a glacier collapse. In doing so, they witnessed in near real time the ongoing collapse of a second glacier.
=> We are preparing the distribution of maps of the snow cover extent made from the Sentinel-2 data for Theia. If the method used to detect the snow is based on well-proven concepts, spatial and temporal resolution of the snow maps will however quite unprecedented. Until now, maps of the snow cover extent were usually produced […]