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, […]
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 […]
=> 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 […]
After reading my previous post about the Rutog ice avalanche, my distinguished colleagues Antoine R. and Olivier H. challenged me to look for a pre-event image to better highlight the avalanche area. The closest clear-sky image that I could find is a Landsat-8 image that was acquired on June 24 (23 days before the slide).
The Nature News website reported yesterday on a massive ice avalanche that happened in Rutog, Tibet, on 17 July 2016. This ice avalanche killed 9 people and may be one the largest ever observed. The ice and rock mixture spread over 6 km from the collapse point up to the Aru Co lake shoreline.
NASA’s blog « Image of the Day » recently featured two beautiful MODIS images of the snow cover in Lesotho. In late July Lesotho experienced its heaviest snowfall in two decades. The snow is not uncommon in Lesotho given that over 80% of the country lies above 1800 m. However the frequency of such snow events has […]
=> Optical remote sensing is great to map the snow cover extent in mountain regions as long as there is no cloud above the land surface. Radar remote sensing of the snow cover is not operational yet mainly because the backscatter from the snow surface is strongly dependent on the snowpack liquid water content. On […]
=> In the framework of the THEIA land data center, we have developed a simple but robust method to map the snow cover from Sentinel-2-like level 2A products. This code was tested with SPOT-4 Take-5 and Landsat-8 series, but it remained to adapt it so that it can run on real Sentinel-2 images! This is […]
=> In a lecture given at University Paul Sabatier on December 10, 2015 « Should we be afraid of climate change? », Franck Roux told this sentence (I quote from memory): « The human being is a very good weather sensor, but it is a poor climate sensor. » Since our memory can play tricks on us, satellite images […]