Research in Earth Observation

1. Research in Earth Observation Prof. Mike Barnsley, Department of Geography, University of Wales Swansea.

2. Outline of Presentation • Inferring land surface biophysical and biochemical properties from space; • Universities and industry in partnership: CHRIS/PROBA — a “SmallSat” mission; • Identifying the ‘brown field’ sites — mapping and monitoring land use within urban areas.

3. Global Environmental Monitoring • Involved in several international satellite sensor missions (NASA-MODIS, CNES-SPOT4, CNES/NASDA-POLDER).

4. First derivative spectrum showing “red edge” posit-ion (REP) at ~0.69m. REP highly correlated with chlorophyll content. Inferring Surface Biochemistry Reflectance spectrum for a single green leaf showing absorption by chlorophyll at 0.5m and 0.65m

5. Scaling-up — Leaf to Canopy In radiative terms, vegetation canopies do not behave simply as ‘big leaves’. Errors will be introduced if we assume leaf-scale relationships hold at the canopy scale. The magnitude of these errors will be a function of the canopy geometry.

6. Determining SurfaceBiophysical Properties Nadir Forward scatter Backscatter

7. MVA (Green) MVA (Red) MVA (SWIR) Surface Biophysical Properties NIR,Red, Green

8. Isotropic scattering Volume scattering Geometrical-optical effects Surface Biophysical Properties

9. Surface Biophysical Properties Isotropic reflectance parameter (spectral albedo at 865nm) derived from POLDER on ADEOS data.

10. University/Industry Partnership • MVA approach is being exploited for agricultural monitoring through ESA Small-Sat project in partnership with Sira Electro-Optics Ltd, plus NRSC, Logica and Zeneca. CHRIS (Compact High Resolution Imaging Spectrometer) will be mounted on the PROBA satellite (PROject for On-Board Autonomy).

11. University/Industry Partnership • First test of the new breed of “smaller, faster, cheaper” satellites. • Good example of U.K. science budget leveraging large ESA spend. • Transforming scientific research into economically-viable, commercial applications of Earth Observation

12. Urban ‘Brown Field’ Sites • Need to identify urban ‘brown field’ sites suitable for re-development for the projected 4 million new homes required by 2016. • Exploit new generation of ultra-high spatial resolution, commercially-operated satellite sensors… • …BUT…we need to develop new data-processing techniques appropriate to the scale/resolution of the data sets that these sensors will produce.

13. Urban ‘Brown Field’ Sites • Working jointly with OS, Cardiff and Bristol C&CC; • Infer land use from automated structural pattern analysis of land cover parcels identified in digital images. 25cm image for part of Bristol.

14. Urban ‘Brown Field’ Sites • Developing graph-theoretic, structural pattern-recognition system to infer land use from the morphological properties of, and spatial/structural relations between, discrete land cover parcels. Land cover parcels Adjacency graph

15. Urban ‘Brown Field’ Sites • OS interested in potential of system to assist in identification of new developments and in automated map updating. OS-derived buildings Image-derived buildings

16. Other EO Research at Swansea • Biodiversity of coastal dune systems using imaging spectrometers and LiDAR; • Momentum and mass budgets of ‘surging’ glaciers using interferometric SAR; • The carbon cycle of boreal forests using SAR; • Scaling and generalization in the production of global land cover maps from EO.