MarinEye - A tool for marine monitoring

This work presents an autonomous system for marine integrated physical-chemical and biological monitoring – the MarinEye system. It comprises a set of sensors providing diverse and relevant information for oceanic environment characterization and marine biology studies. It is constituted by a physicalchemical water properties sensor suite, a water filtration and sampling system for DNA collection, a plankton imaging system and biomass assessment acoustic system. The MarinEye system has onboard computational and logging capabilities allowing it either for autonomous operation or for integration in other marine observing systems (such as Observatories or robotic vehicles. It was designed in order to collect integrated multi-trophic monitoring data. The validation in operational environment on 3 marine observatories: RAIA, BerlengasWatch and Cascais on the coast of Portugal is also discussed.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Overview of ESA’s Earth Observation upcoming small satellites missions

The “New Space” paradigm, has enabled the creation of many new opportunities in the space sector like the development of a large number of missions based on small and nano-satellites. The European Space Agency (ESA) is supporting these new development approaches and technology advancements, including use of Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components to enable missions based on small and nano satellites. ESA’s Earth Observation Programmes Directorate (ESA-EOP) is already involved not only in the implementation of technologies exploiting the capabilities offered by small and nano-satellites as a complement to the EOP scientific and application-driven flagship satellites, but also in the quick validation of new approaches like A.I, super resolution or more in general in orbit data processing. ESA-EOP developments in the area of small and nano satellites are spread in three different programmatic lines, each with its own objectives: Scout and F-sat Missions and the InCubed Programme. This paper presents the overall ESA-EOP small missions strategy providing a brief insight on the genesis of each programmatic line and their selection processes including an update of the status of the first initiatives and missions under development or study

Moving dunes on the Google Earth

Several methods exist for surveying the dunes and estimate their migration rate. Among methods suitable for the macroscopic scale, the use of the satellite images available on Google Earth is a convenient resource, in particular because of its time series. Some examples of the use of this feature of Google Earth are here proposed.Comment: Keywords: Dunes, Dune Migration, Satellite Imagery, Google Earth, Image Processin

Ocean climate data for user community in West and Central Africa: Needs, opportunities, and challenges

The urgent need to improve data delivery systems needed by scientists studying ocean role in climate and climate characteristics has been manifested in recent years because of the unprecedented climatic events experienced in many parts of the world. Indeed, there has been a striking and growing realization by governments and the general public indicating that national economies and human welfare depend on climate and its variability. In West and Central Africa, for instance climatic events, which have resulted in floods and droughts, have caused a lot of concern to both governments and people of the region. In particular, the droughts have been so widespread that greater awareness and concern have become generated for the need to find solutions to the problems created by the consequences of the climatic events. Particularly in the southern border regions of the Sahara Desert as well as in the Sahel region, the drought episodes considerably reduced food production and led to series of socioeconomic problems, not only in the areas affected by the droughts, but also in the other parts of West Africa. The various climatic variabilities which have caused the climatic events are no doubt related to the ocean-atmosphere interactions. Unfortunately, not much has been done on the understanding of these interactions, particularly as they affect developing countries. Indeed, not much has been done to develop programs which will reflect the general concerns and needs for researching into the ocean-atmosphere systems and their implications on man-environmental systems in many developing countries. This is for example, true of West and Central Africa, where compared with the middle latitude countries, much less is known about the characteristics of the ocean-atmosphere systems and their significance on man-environmental systems of the area

Paper Session I-B - An Operational System for Launch Area Hazard Prediction and Mitigation

The Meteorological And Range Safety Support ( MARSS) system provides the Air Force and NASA with a combined meteorological/toxic hazard support capability to protect personnel and property engaged in vehicle processing, material handling, launch preparation and launch support activities. The primary users for MARSS are the Air Force\u27s 45th and 30th Space Wings and NASA\u27s Kennedy Space Center. These organizations provide joint base toxic and hazard support activities for their facilities, personnal and surrounding communities. The MARSS system is the result of a highly successful technology transfer from innovative research to operational product and provides: • Quality analysis of weather measurements from over 70 different instruments • Extensive set of meteorological and hazard prediction tools for 2 and 3- dimensional toxic material release, blast hazards and risk to human life • Use of expert systems technology to monitor real-time weather measurements in order to detect user specified hazardous conditions and alert when they are detected • Continuous (24 hour/7 day) availability The use of the MARSS system saves money through the improved efficiency of functional consolidation and integrated communication tools. A single user can now perform a series of support tasks that had previously taken 2-3 personnel. It further enhances communications between Government safety personnel and local town, county and state emergency response planners and personnel

Resource provisioning in Science Clouds: Requirements and challenges

Cloud computing has permeated into the information technology industry in the last few years, and it is emerging nowadays in scientific environments. Science user communities are demanding a broad range of computing power to satisfy the needs of high-performance applications, such as local clusters, high-performance computing systems, and computing grids. Different workloads are needed from different computational models, and the cloud is already considered as a promising paradigm. The scheduling and allocation of resources is always a challenging matter in any form of computation and clouds are not an exception. Science applications have unique features that differentiate their workloads, hence, their requirements have to be taken into consideration to be fulfilled when building a Science Cloud. This paper will discuss what are the main scheduling and resource allocation challenges for any Infrastructure as a Service provider supporting scientific applications

Ocean services user needs assessment. Volume 1: Survey results, conclusions and recommendations

An interpretation of environmental information needs of marine users, derived from a direct contact survey of eight important sectors of the marine user community is presented. Findings of the survey and results and recommendations are reported. The findings consist of specific and quantized measurement and derived product needs for each sector and comparisons of these needs with current and planned NOAA data and services. The following supportive and reference material are examined: direct contact interviews with industry members, analyses of current NOAA data gathering and derived product capabilities, evaluations of new and emerging domestic and foreign satellite data gathering capabilities, and a special commercial fishing survey conducted by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)