One Day Joe Morrison, the vice president of a satellite company, gave his team members a strange task: Go buy images from again Corporate photography spaceship. He wants to see how easy it is to exchange money for those orbital goods and services. So the team searched and asked to take a satellite image of an area in Southeast Asia, to be taken within the next three weeks. They paid about $500. Easy.
However, three weeks later, they received only radio silence. It turned out that the company was not able to process it quickly, and the broker canceled their order. It’s a high-demand area in which many people want to take portraits. Plus, it’s monsoon season, when clear photos are hard to come by. So instead, the company has tasked its satellite with taking pictures at some point next year.
… Thank?
For Morrison, this experience has proven much wrong in the “remote sensing” industry. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but that’s only true if you can take it right from the start. Clouds cover about two-thirds of the Earth on average. And at any given time, about half of the planet is dark. (The experience of this area is often referred to as “night.”) In either condition, traditional satellite imagery isn’t worth many words. And if you want to buy multiple photos of the same area, keeping track of how things change, it becomes difficult and expensive — unless you’re a defense ministry or spy agency with a pocketbook. money deep and affect the queue. That’s why Morrison hopes data from his employer – a company called Umbra, based in Santa Barbara, California – can deliver on the remote sensing industry’s long-held promise: Surveillance capabilities Earth, don’t just take the occasional still photo of it.
Courtesy of Umbra Lab Inc.
Anyway, Umbra’s satellite failed to take pictures; they take “synthetic aperture radar” (SAR) data, which means functionally “space radar data”. It works like this: A satellite shoots microwaves at the planet, then waits for their echoes to bounce back. Since the satellite will orbit a slightly different point between radar emission and return, it effectively acts as an antenna as large as that distance — a “composite aperture”. Objects with different makeup reflect microwaves differently — for example, a building behaves differently than the ocean. And objects at different distances from the satellite will take different amounts of time to propagate back into space. So, using SAR, analysts can get some pretty sharp details in terms of shape, size, and even layout.
Most importantly, microwaves shoot straight through the clouds and don’t know the difference between day and night. Therefore, SAR satellites can observe the Earth in any weather, at any hour. That ability is proving particularly useful for those looking to track events that tend to happen in overcast and dark conditions: floods.
Flooding has long been a cause of human suffering – it destroys crops, livestock, infrastructure and human lives. Climate change is increasing the risk of flooding, because extreme weather events and sea level in progress. According to professional services firm Marsh McLennan, which specializes in risk assessment, since 1980 There were approximately 4,600 floods worldwide, totaling more than $1 trillion in damage, or about 40% of the world’s total disaster damage. Severe flooding is a public health hazard, such as monsoon flooding in 2020 in India, which killed 1,922 people — the deadliest natural disaster of the year, unless you count Covid. Worldwide, floods killed more than 6,000 people that year Global Disaster Assessment Report.
