Thursday, November 16, 2017

Z_GIS team awarded 3rd place at the European Copernicus Masters University Challenge

Congratulations to Martin Sudmanns, Hannah Augustin, Christian Werner, Anna-Maria Cavallaro, Dirk Tiede and Stefan Lang! The Z_GIS researchers developed and submitted a web-application to the Copernicus Masters University Challenge 2017.

The tool aims to improve the conceptualisation, planning and feasibility assessment of earth observation (EO) projects by providing information about the suitability of data for known project specifications. Projects utilising European Sentinel satellite data can be approached more efficiently, saving time and initial planning costs. The tool will also aid less experienced users of EO-data towards more efficient and targeted project planning and execution.

The interactive Web-based tool visualises and analyses the metadata of the 2+ million currently accessible Sentinel-2 images, revealing spatio-temporal variability of acquisitions that inherently influence analyses. It allows querying spatially explicit aggregated information, such as average cloud cover, average time span between scene acquisitions, time gap between cloud-free scenes, etc. Analytical maps explore specific themes (e.g. cloud cover) improving the identification of suitable study areas, or retrieval of Sentinel-2 imagery for a use-case with specific data characteristics.

For example, a project team might be interested in monitoring deforestation in Indonesia based on change detection using a time-series. With the tool, the users can select an area-of-interest and immediately retrieve relevant information about the frequency of acquisition, historic information of the average time between cloud-free acquisitions, etc.

Contact: Martin Sudmanns 

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