Natural Catastrophe Response Requires Friendly Tools & SAR Imagery
2021-09-30, 09:30–10:00, Microsoft AI for Earth

Climate change has immediate and observable impacts on Earth. The increase in natural catastrophes and our lack of community and global readiness is apparent. Commercial, affordable SAR constellations will result in the decentralization of Earth observation, improving natural catastrophe responsiveness, resilience, and broader community engagement. SAR sensors, with the ability to observe the Earth in ways entirely inaccessible by optical and infrared sensors, present a unique capacity to quantify catastrophic impact and plan for future improvement. But SAR imagery alone is not enough: the high resolution, coherence, and frequency of revisit are only as good as the tooling shared to facilitate insights and actions. Many tools are currently available, but can also be a challenge to scale with modern cloud resources as they are often developed by scientists for scientists or locked in classified government environments. What types of open source tools are required for sustainable solution development with SAR and how can we improve existing open source contributions as we exponentially collect imagery? How can we liberate knowledge often owned only by SAR experts? In this talk, we will discuss natural catastrophe solution development at ICEYE with high temporal and spatial resolution SAR and how we overcome the challenges through partnerships such as with ESA Phi-Lab and the ESA Third Party Mission (TPM) program.


Climate change has immediate and observable impacts on Earth. The increase in natural catastrophes and our lack of community and global readiness is apparent. Commercial, affordable SAR constellations will result in the decentralization of Earth observation, improving natural catastrophe responsiveness, resilience, and broader community engagement. SAR sensors, with the ability to observe the Earth in ways entirely inaccessible by optical and infrared sensors, present a unique capacity to quantify catastrophic impact and plan for future improvement. But SAR imagery alone is not enough: the high resolution, coherence, and frequency of revisit are only as good as the tooling shared to facilitate insights and actions. Many tools are currently available, but can also be a challenge to scale with modern cloud resources as they are often developed by scientists for scientists or locked in classified government environments. What types of open source tools are required for sustainable solution development with SAR and how can we improve existing open source contributions as we exponentially collect imagery? How can we liberate knowledge often owned only by SAR experts? In this talk, we will discuss natural catastrophe solution development at ICEYE with high temporal and spatial resolution SAR and how we overcome the challenges through partnerships such as with ESA Phi-Lab and the ESA Third Party Mission (TPM) program.


Authors and Affiliations

Strong, Shay
ICEYE, Finland

Track

Use cases & applications

Topic

Data collection, data sharing, data science, open data, big data, data exploitation platforms

Level

1 - Principiants. No required specific knowledge is needed.

Language of the Presentation

English