Hello, and welcome to GeoSpatial Stream. I’m your host, Todd Danielson, and today’s Lead Sponsor is Trimble Geospatial Division.
It’s been a little while, but today’s Top Story is, again, Climate Change. It’s not going away, and conditions keep getting worse. Here are some highlights:
Globally, August 2016 marked the 16th straight month of record warmth for the planet, the longest streak in 137 years. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, found that the month was 1.66 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th century average, breaking the record set last August. Year to date, the global temperature was 1.82 degrees Fahrenheit above average, also breaking last year’s record.
According to U.S. data from NOAA, summer 2016 was the fifth warmest on record, but its nights were the hottest ever, with average temperatures about 2.4 degrees Fahrenheit above normal.
Let’s not forget about the disastrous flooding that rocked Louisiana this summer, which was the state’s second 1,000-year flood, this year … They’re supposed to happen only once every 1,000 years. This was the eighth U.S. flood considered to be a once-every-500-years event, or worse, this year …
And a NASA analysis of satellite data showed that the 2016 Arctic sea ice minimum tied for the second-lowest yearly minimum in the satellite record, which began in 1978, more than 900,000 square miles below the 30-year average.
That was today’s Top Story. I’ll be back with more news after this interview clip of Trimble’s Eric McCuaig at the ILMF 2016 event.
On September 16th, Arianespace launched a Vega rocket carrying four SkySat microsatellites for Terra Bella as well as PeruSAT-1, Peru’s first Earth-observation satellite.
And there’s now a whole new way of measuring the ocean, as Esri introduced Ecological Marine Units (EMUs), calling them “Esri’s gift to a world whose final unexplored terrain lies beneath its seas.”
Esri and USGS collected a series of global measurements representing the ocean’s physical and chemical properties most likely to drive ecosystem responses. From millions of measurements taken, 37 physically and chemically distinct volumetric regions, or EMUs, were statistically derived. The primary data source is NOAA’s World Ocean Atlas.
In industry headlines, Phase One Industrial introduced the Phase One 4-Band Solution, featuring a batch-processing tool that automates and simplifies the four-band aerial image generation process.
TerraGo released TerraGo GeoPDF version 7, which offers new features designed to enable open, cross-platform, cloud and mobile access to maps, engineering drawings, high-resolution imagery and other types of spatial data assets.
Datumate introduced DatuFly, a new tablet app for drone flight planning and automated, high-resolution photo acquisition.
And Satlab Geosolutions released its multi-purpose SLC RTK handheld solution for high-precision positioning via Bluetooth connectivity to Android, Windows and iOS devices.
For today’s Final Thought, here’s a cool video from the European Space Agency’s deep-space tracking station near Madrid, which ran a series of test flights to image the station’s 35-meter-diameter antenna dish using a DJI Phantom 3 drone controlled with an iPad.
That’s it for this broadcast. I’m Todd Danielson, and this … was your GeoSpatial Stream.
