Earlier this month when there was an oil spill on the Great Barrier Reef, surveyors were called in to gather important spatial data. This can be an expensive exercise as it requires chartering a plane or helicopter to survey from the air. Funnily enough, these days it is actually much cheaper and quicker if you can survey from space, provided you have the right infrastructure in place.
In many disaster situations one of the first things you have to do is leave the area and get out of the air space. Ironically this is the time you most need to gather intelligence from that area.
Remote satellite imaging is sometimes also called earth observation, because it is technology which allows us to observe what is happening on earth from space using image sensing. In many respects the equipment is little more sophisticated than a digital camera except that employs more bands than the colours used by your digital camera. Remote satellite imaging uses a whole variety of bands such as, blue, green, red, infra-red, radar / microwave, to create a vital picture of what is happening on earth. The really difficult and expensive part of the technology is the logistics of getting it up where the good view is.
Most of my work revolves around making sense of the spatial data received through remote satellite imaging.
Within hours of the Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano erupting our team had already asked partners around the world to take images and share them with us. From these images we are studying how much ground has been displaced, the movement of lava, how much ice has melted and where the ash is travelling. It would have been far too dangerous to study these things from the ground, or even from the air, but we can do it quickly and safely using pictures from space.
During the Victorian bushfires in February 2009 there were enormous challenges for central commands on the ground to know which communities were most under threat. However using remote satellite imaging it was very clear where hotspots, smoke, fire fronts and clumps of ash were located, as well as how they were moving.
In 2008, when a series of earthquakes hit the Sichuan province in China, we sourced images from Japanese collaborators, analysed them and gave the information to the Chinese authorities to assist with rescue efforts and the restoration of essential services.
The shame is that in all these instances we could have been achieving our goals in much closer to real-time. Often, if the information we provide can be delivered within hours instead of days, lives can be saved, environmental effects lessened and negative economic impacts reduced.
There are 3 essential components needed to provide the infrastructure for a vibrant remote satellite imaging industry:
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Satellites in space,
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Receivers (like the ‘Dish’) on the ground,
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and applications to make sense of the data received and skilled people to interpret it.
Although Australia has no satellite in orbit, we can be proud of our world-class technology and skills in transforming spatial data. So Australia should be ideally positioned to benefit from this growth industry.
Unfortunately we have hit a national stumbling block because the second stage of the essential infrastructure is insufficient; we simply don’t have enough satellite imaging receivers on the ground. The USA has hundreds of receivers, Australia has 3.
Should a massive natural disaster or other catastrophic event affect Australia, we will be in a much better position to react swiftly if we have an appropriate level of satellite image receiving infrastructure.
It’s incredibly frustrating to know that the information is available, we just can’t access it. It’s a bit like knowing everybody else has digital TV for free but not being able to get our hands on set-top box!
Surprisingly it’s not a huge investment that would be required, only a few million dollars, but the benefits would be huge.
Once remote satellite image receiving infrastructure is in place, Australia will be able to really punch above our weight in this field. The public, private and other sectors all stand to benefit from the capabilities it will create. There’s a viable business model whereby the reuse of commercial images could subsidise improvements to emergency services and climate change
responsiveness.
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Linlin Ge upon graduating with a Ph.D. from The University of New South Wales, won an ARC Postdoctoral Fellowship (2002-2004), that allowed him to ramp up research into differential Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radara (DInSAR) for ground deformation monitoring. In 2004 he was appointed at the position of Senior Lecturer in the School of Surveying & Spatial Information Systems. Linlin is leader of the CRC for Spatial Information project 4.2 "Digital Elevation Model Generation & Differential Synthetic Radar Interferometry". In 2008 Linlin Ge was appointed Associate Professor to support CRC-SI and NSW Dept. of Lands projects.
