Remote sensing, while obviously having its limits, means that some fog of war can be lifted. In the past days I have been keeping an eye every now and then on the EU’s forest fire detection system. It shows satellite observed fire sources. Some of that is indeed forest fire, but a lot is also human activity. Currently it is also a proxy for the fighting in Ukraine. In the screen shot below you see the area NW of Kyiv, with Hostomel airport (blue dots in the middle top) and Irpin (red and orange dots in the middle bottom) for instance. Red dots are fires detected in the past day, orange the past week, and blue the past month. It appears that where there has been heavy fighting around Hostomel earlier, the blue dots, in the past week a lot of fighting took place in Irpin.
Click to enlarge, screenshot of the EFFIS service
It’s weird to look at those dots, not knowing what they normally mean in the context of this data service, while also being aware what destruction and death on the ground they are a proxy for right now.
In ons data-rijke tijdperk kan data gericht op 1 doel ons ook op andere manieren informeren:
Forest Fire Detection As Proxy For War zylstra.org/blog/2022/03/f…
A pretty regular week, with a surprise dusting of snow on Thursday and Friday.
This week I
Got my booster vaccination (3 months postponed due to catching the virus late last year), which resulted in an unexpected conversation
Spent time with a retirement advisor to create retirement funding for our employees
Did multiple in-depth interviews with operational examples of digital twin use for the built environment, focusing on any obstacles, and their solutions, in sharing data into and out of a digital twin, where multiple stakeholders, domains etc are involved.
Had the weekly client meetings
Did multiple other interviews with large dataholders like the Cadastral Office, and ministerial departments, on finding practical cases around data use in multi-stakeholder multi-domain settings.
Did some preparation for a geo-data conference I will be participating in next week
Had an informal meet-up with the team for the national reference architecture for digital twins for the built environment, now that the first phase is complete. Interesting conversations I want to follow up on in the coming weeks.
Signed a new hire, who will start in May, after last weeks decision two sign two candidates
Went for lunch in town with the three of us
Prepared a presentation for the ‘Microblog Readers Republic’, a group of book readers having monthly conversations about books, and how we learn from them. A good exercise in writing down how my actual work flow for reading and annotation etc is shaped. The session itself is tonight around midnight, due to the sum of both European and New-Zealand shifts in daylight saving time conspiring to move the meeting two hours from its previous time.
Generally spent too much time tracking news about Russia’s war on Ukraine
Today a colleague at the Netherlands Space Office showed me a new Copernicus service, the ground motion service (EGMS). Quite an amazing data service to explore. Earlier I wrote about the European forest fire information service (EFFIS), and its use as a proxy for the fighting going on due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. EGMS is another service based on satellite remote sensing, here radar telemetry tracking the subsidence or rising of the ground. As far as I understand it can’t ‘see’ soft materials (peat land subsiding e.g.), only sees hard materials (solid ground, or buildings on softer grounds).
The images are quite amazing, and the data is provided right alongside it.
First an overview of northern Europe. Blue is rising ground, red is sinking ground. Sweden and Finland show rising ground, this is still the bounce back of the earth since the last ice age ended when the tremendous weight of glaciers was removed. At the tip of the arrow you see subsiding ground, this is the result of gas extraction in Groningen province.
Zooming in on Groningen province, here’s the data for a single house, subsiding 4 centimeters in the past 6 years. No wonder many homes are getting damaged in that area, both from subsidence as well as from the earthquakes that accompany it.
For comparison, here’s the data from the street I live on. It shows a subsidence of 6 millimeters in the past 6 years.
And here’s the same data as in the graph in the image above, but exported from the Copernicus services as an SVG, and pasted here as text.
-14-12-10-8-6-4-202468101214Displacement mm2016011120160428201608142016113020170318201707042017102020180211201805302018091520190101201904192019080520191121202003082020062420201010Measurement dateORTHO Vertical: 20dXRnBSzzDataset: Point ID: Position: Mean velocity: RMSE: ORTHO Vertical20dXRnBSzz3242050.00 N 4007550.00 E -0.60 m-1.10 mm/year0.40 mm