Welcome to our GEO University Blog!
Read about GIS and Earth Observation topics, resources for courses and more!
Rocket Science - It's not that hard!
“It’s not Rocket Science.” This is a phrase that many of us have used at least once our life to say that you do not think that something is very difficult to do or to understand. Let's put the notes down. A Rocket (space transportation, launch vehicle) is a “thing” that “spits out” hot gasses, a simple yet forceful machine that propel objects into the air.
Hyperspectral Remote Sensing
Remote Sensing has been identified as “the field of study associated with extracting information about an object without coming into physical contact with it”. In that regard, remote sensing sensors capture specific information from which decisions can be made. For example, a weather satellite can acquire remote sensing images and by proper algorithmic processing, atmospheric parameters can be derived, which ultimately can drive decisions. Often, the remote sensing sensors do not directly measure the particular information of interest, but simply record data from which the desired information can be extracted or correlated.
Top GIS questions and answers
Let's start asking GIS related questions and get simple and focused answers!
GEO University Supports Copernicus Hackathon Sofia
We are proud to announce that GEO University supports the Copernicus Hackathon Bulgaria!
As we are dedicated in providing state-of-art online courses in the fields of GIS and Earth Observation, supporting a great hackathon like Copernicus Hackathon is really exciting for us.
Satellite Image Metadata and their applications in Remote Sensing
In most introductory courses and lessons for Remote Sensing, the mechanics of the Remote Sensing system are explained, along with the basic mathematics and algorithms of image processing for satellite imagery. However, we tend to overlook the image metadata parameters, and sometimes, especially for Very High Resolution Imagery, they significantly affect the image processing workflows or can be even used to directly yield useful information from the images!
Oil spills detection and identification with Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR)
How to detect and monitor oil spills from space?
In the last decades oil spill pollution is a matter of great concern since it affects the environment, economy, life cycle, the human food chain and as a result constitutes a crucial environmental and socio-economic problem. Oil spills can seriously damage beaches, marshlands and fragile marine ecosystems. This happens because oil-petroleum hydrocarbons contain many toxic compounds that cause huge damages in vegetation but in greater level to the Sea life
Remote sensing technologies and soil moisture retrieval
What kind of Earth Observation technologies are used to retrieve soil moisture?
Soil moisture is one of the most difficult soil properties to measure because of its large spatial and temporal variability.
How to detect and map forest fires using Earth Observation images?
Exploiting MODIS and Landsat satellite images
Forest fires are one of the main causes of destruction of natural resources and this is observed on a global scale. Many countries worldwide are affected by this calamity, which is induced by nature and human activities. Using satellite data it is revealed that in last decade nearly 350 million hectares of land was affected by vegetation fires worldwide...
An automatic relative radiometric normalization methodology for multispectral and hyperspectral images
How to automatically correct the radiometry of optical Earth Observation images?
Multi-temporal airborne and satellite multispectral/hyperspectral images are often used for monitoring the environment and detecting land cover changes. The different atmospheric and illumination conditions, sensor performance and viewing angles result into differences in the reflectance values of the same objects in multi-temporal images...
A SEMANTIC AWARE METHOD FOR RETRIEVING REMOTE SENSING IMAGES
How to find satellite images with a semantic concept?
Content-based remote sensing image retrieval techniques have been introduced for bridging the gap between low-level semantics of images and high-level semantics of user queries...
MAKING HIGH RESOLUTION SEAMLESS CLOUDLESS MOSAIC OF ESTONIA
Cloud free mosaics or composites products are a special type of advanced Earth Observation products that can be used in numerous applications. The process of creating high resolution and accurate seamless cloud-free mosaics is a very sophisticated and time consuming process.
Coastal environmental monitoring
How to monitor water quality from space?
The coastal habitats including the near shore water and land bodies are essential for the sustainable development of the economy and play an important role to the societal growth. Decision makers, urban planners, and environmental organisations are using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) along with satellite images and ground through data to help them understand and better manage the local ecosystem.
Promote your geospatial knowledge and advance your career with certificates!
Did you know that courses in GEO University come with digital certificates?
Receiving a digital certificate upon completion of a course is an important part of learning culture.
Each student that enrolls and succesfully finishes a course can claim AT NO EXTRA COST their certificate of completion and the corresponding badge...
Creating maps and geospatial stories
Maps. The tool for our eyes to comprehend the spatial world at smaller scales.
Day by day, the difficulty in creating such tool is decreased. Thanks to new technologies and the massive availability of data, everyone is able to create a map. And what can this map represent? Anything that has spatial attributes! Whichever element has a defined location can be represented on a map. In urban planning, for example, buildings can be illustrated as polygons, roads as lines and trees as points...
SAR Interferometry with SARscape
How to generate a Digital Elevation Model in 7 steps with SAR images and SARscape?
Step 1: Baseline Estimation
The initial pair of SAR images in slc format is given as input and some field information about the track is filled in by the program...
Retrieve Soil Moisture with S-band SAR images
How can we retrieve soil moisture with SAR images?
In the past years Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) was successfully applied to soil moisture retrieval with promising results and the launch of dedicated space missions carrying a radar sensor is evidence of its increasing importance. An significant example is represented by the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission, designed by NASA and launched in January 2015. SMAP carries both a radiometer and a SAR in L-band to improve both resolution and accuracy in the soil moisture retrieval. Another mission having soil moisture characterization among its potential application fields is the UK NovaSAR-S...
The effects of the soil surface roughness and soil moisture content on the soil spectral signature
How spectral signatures are affected by soil variations?
The estimation of soil moisture is approached by various remote sensing technologies. Initially the main research focused on the Synthetic Aperture RADAR (SAR) images. SAR are widely used for this purpose because of the relatively deep penetration of the microwave radiation, up to one meter deep. Despite this advantage SAR imagery suffer from high noise levels (speckle) and the surface roughness derived from the backscatter coefficient can significantly alter the results....
Spectral Indices with multispectral satellite data
Why use spectral indices from satellites?
Over the years numerous spectral indices have been introduced by the scientific community to solve complex environmental (or other) issues. After a quite extensive survey we present you the most popular indices that be calculated by either of the following free data satellites...
QGIS 3.0 as a Business Model
How to use QGIS within your business?
QGIS is the most popular Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software in the geoscientific community.
Its interface is friendly and intuitive; its operation is simple; there is a large amount of resources to be used; it presents open source code that allows to modify or customize the platform, among other qualities...
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