Spatial Thoughts Newsletter #30
Free and Open Satellite Data from ISRO
Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) operates a huge constellation of remote sensing satellites, but their data was never available to the public and was difficult to procure. Finally under the new India Space Policy 2023 - they decided to release much of their archive as ‘free-and-open’ data. NRSC implemented this policy last month and made the data available for download. This open archive includes data from ResourceSat2/2A from the LISS4 camera having a spatial resolution of 5.8m. Making this the highest resolution open data available for India. As you can see in the image below - you can see much more finer details compared to the Sentinel-2 data.
To make it easier to use this data - I worked on building an open-source Python workflow to process this data. The implementation is done in XArray - which allows you to easily work with local or cloud-hosted data and process it with parallel computing using Dask. Check out my new article LISS4 Image Processing using XArray and Dask which explains the process for downloading and processing the data using Python.
New QGIS Tutorials
We published several new step-by-step QGIS tutorials - including one to create a colorized river basin map anywhere in the world using open datasets. We also have a growing list of thematic tutorials focused on urban planning. Check out the tutorials from the links below:
Upcoming Classes
Regular online instructor-led classes are back. We have several classes scheduled over the next few months.
Python Foundation for Spatial Analysis (February 2024)
Mastering GDAL Tools (February 2024)
End-to-End Google Earth Engine (March 2024)
Just a few spots remain. If you wish to attend any of these classes, make sure to book your seat soon.
New Dynamic World Workshops
Dynamic World is a landcover product developed by Google and WRI. I developed and conducted several new Google Earth Engine workshops that show how to use this unique dataset for landcover classification and monitoring. Check out these new resources:
Enhancing Land Cover with Local Knowledge: An article with an overview of the dataset and applications in building locally relevant landcover maps.
Hands-on Introduction to Dynamic World: An introductory workshop to utilize the Dynamic World dataset in Google Earth Engine.
Monitoring Land Use Land Cover Changes with Google Earth Engine: A workshop to use Dynamic World for landcover monitoring with both Javascript and Python code.