Hello, and welcome to GeoSpatial Stream. I’m your host, Todd Danielson, and today’s Lead Sponsor is Trimble Geospatial Division.
Today’s Top Story is Climate Change. Sure, we cover that a lot here, but until we find another planet or huge spaceship to live on, we’ll keep reporting major developments in this critical area.
For starters, NASA selected proposals for two new instruments that will observe changes in global vegetation from the International Space Station. The sensors will give scientists new ways to see how forests and ecosystems are affected by changes in climate or land use. A high-resolution, multiple-wavelength imaging spectrometer from JPL will study the effectiveness of water use by vegetation, and a laser-based system from the University of Maryland, College Park, will observe the structure of forest canopy.
In other climate news, measurements from ESA’s CryoSat mission have been used to map the height of ice sheets that blanket Greenland and Antarctica, and show how they’re changing. New results reveal combined ice volume loss at an unprecedented rate of 500 cubic kilometers per year. The research was carried out by Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, and the results were published in The Cryosphere, a European Geosciences Union journal. The new maps, which incorporate 7.5-million elevation measurements of Greenland and 61 million of Antarctica, collected by CryoSat in 2012, are the most complete to date from a single satellite mission.
That was today’s Top Story. I’ll be back with more news after this brief message.
According to an official with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, higher-capacity ports, expanded locks and dams, and other infrastructure improvements are needed in the Mississippi River Watershed to allow its waterways to handle shipping demands caused by higher agriculture needs, oil and natural-gas production, and climate-change effects. Brig. Gen. Peter A. DeLuca, commander of the corps’ Mississippi Valley Division, called on federal, state and local governments — plus citizens groups, businesses and private entrepreneurs — to invest in updating existing infrastructure and starting new projects.
Education software publisher Maps.com released its Field Trip Library series, which is powered by the Esri Story Map platform. Students are introduced to fundamental GIS concepts while exploring global culture, regional patterns and major historical events through interactive maps. Field trips are enhanced with classroom materials such as videos, news stories, and activities designed for Common Core and state-standards-aligned teaching.
In industry headlines, American Sentinel University published a free new e-book, ‘GIS for Crime Analysis, Law Enforcement and Public Safety,’ which profiles how GIS has become an effective crime-fighting tool used by law-enforcement agencies to uncover criminal patterns that would be otherwise impossible to identify.
Nokia announced that Michael Halbherr is stepping down as CEO of Nokia HERE to pursue entrepreneurial interests. And Apple hired former Nokia HERE and NAVTEQ executive Torsten Krenz to help bolster its Apple Maps division.
I’ll close out this episode with a cool video from the National Ecological Observatory Network on how LiDAR can be used to monitor and measure trees. I’ll also post the entire video on GeoSpatial Stream: That’s it for this broadcast, I’m Todd Danielson, and this … was your GeoSpatial Stream.
