EO Earth Observations

Generic introductory material.

ESA Newcomers Earth observation guide - https://business.esa.int/newcomers-earth-observation-guide

Canadian tutorial on remote sensing fundamentals - https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/maps-tools-publications/satellite-imagery-air-photos/tutorial-fundamentals-remote-sensing/9309

Optical remote sensing at https://eo-college.org.

There are a large number of courses at EO College. Two relevant options are linked below, but you will also find material on other methods.

https://eo-college.org/resource/principles-of-imaging-spectroscopy/

https://eo-college.org/resource/classification/

Tools and platforms

JASMIN - available Sentinel 1, 2 and 3 and Landsat 5, 7 and 8 can be searched at https://geo-search.ceda.ac.uk/. The video tutorial describes the search and the next steps to access the data. On the map only the first 1000 (100 in a given rectangle) results are displayed. So the map view can be misleading with regards to the results, especially, if results are overlaying a lot. Zooming for example reveals more results, since then the first 1000 results at this zoom level are displayed. Search is done by applying filters with respect to time, location (defined by the map centre and zoom level), rectangle (this needs toggling the rectangle tool in the top right corner to on, otherwise the mouse action will just pull the map), and satellite. Clicking on a specific polygon on the map gives information about that particular satellite image. If it is stored on tape, it wills say so. Otherwise the option to download the data or to view the directory of the data are given. To note is that when clicking Export Results three text export possibilities are given: Raw JSON, File Paths and Download URLs. Of these only the raw JSON indicates whether the data itself is stored on tape. It is important to check whether the data is on tape, because then these instructions on accessing the data need to be followed. First of all a tape quota needs to be requested from [email protected].

SNAP toolbox - https://step.esa.int/main/toolboxes/snap/

EO-learn - https://github.com/sentinel-hub/eo-learn

While you will be using the resources on JASMIN – you may be interested in this summary of currently available processing platforms - https://towardsdatascience.com/the-best-earth-observation-data-science-toolkits-a51d867343a0

SAR introduction

While both topics will likely not use Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data, you may be interested in this link out of curiosity. https://eo-college.org/resource/basics-of-sar/