Yeaaah, the new Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem is online (since 23 January?) and open for registration: https://dataspace.copernicus.eu

Registration seems to work smoothly and download of Sentinel-2 L2A as early as of 2016 only takes a few seconds (i.e. no cold archive)... the roadmap also is full of goodies like STAC, processing API, full Sentinel archive, still this year!

https://documentation.dataspace.copernicus.eu/#/Roadmap

#EarthObservation #RemoteSensing #Geospatial #EOchat

The Orion spacecraft, after an assist by moon's gravity, is now on it's trajectory back to earth: https://www.nasa.gov/specials/trackartemis/

Surprisingly the communication with the spacecraft seems to consume quite a bit of bandwidth of the Deep Space Network which apparently creates bottlenecks for getting data from the JWST telescope:
https://tech.news.am/eng/news/427/why-does-artemis-1-mission-interfere-with-james-webb-telescope.html

My favorite live map for the next days: https://www.nasa.gov/specials/trackartemis/

#artemis

Anyone already has a working recipe for setting up a geospatial Python environment with Python 3.11 (e.g. gdal, rasterio, geopandas)?

Looks like 3.11 will still need some time to propagate through conda-forge for example:

Nice publication by IGN France (Atlas of the Anthropocene):

https://landportal.org/fr/library/resources/atlas-ign-des-cartes-de-lanthropoc%C3%A8ne

I just wish they would have used a better PDF compression so that all legends are indeed readable...

#geospatial #prettymaps

...recently looked on the time series of deforestation for Brazil (https://plataforma.brasil.mapbiomas.org) and it made me wonder why it slowed down after 2005...

Turns out this coincides with the two presidencies of Lula da Silva. When he took office in 2003 the loss of rainforest was 25,396 km²/y, when he left in 2011 this had decreased to 6,418 km²/y and 4,571 km²/y in 2012.

Any number > 0 km²/y is too high, but it is still a good reminder that strong environmental policies are key and can work and no... they do not "harm the economy".

Unfortunately the trend inverted thereafter and reached again ~10k km²/y in 2021.

There are many things that one could criticize about Lula and his party but I certainly hope he gets elected again in October and picks up environmental policies where he left them back in 2011.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_in_Brazil

Remember the big discussion in Germany regarding Google Street View ...

https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article202151416/Datenschutz-Muss-Google-bald-Haeuser-nicht-mehr-verpixeln.html

...which resulted in a) Google had to wait for a certain periods during which anyone could claim a pixelation of their property and b) coverage of Street View is today still very limited and old in Germany.

Well turns out Mapillary (and it's users) which now belong to Meta just picked it up anyway and nobody seem to bother anymore ​

Looks like the Biomass satellite is finally getting closer to launch, now estimated towards end 2023:

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-62650129

If everything works well this will be quite a milestone to get a clearer picture of the global carbon stock and its changes.

Unfortunately not though over North America and Europe since the US MoD uses the same radar frequency (P-band) to watch out for space debris and hostile rockets:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0034425717301943#f0005

#geospatial