"More than 1,000 tombs and 3,000 ancient settlements were also revealed by looking at infra-red images which show up underground buildings."

futurICT

In developing this prototype, we've collaborated with Greg Asner of Carnegie Institution for Science, and Carlos Souza of Imazon. Greg and Carlos are both at the cutting edge of forest science and have developed software that creates forest cover and deforestation maps from satellite imagery. Organizations across Latin America use Greg's program, Carnegie Landsat Analysis System (CLASlite), and Carlos' program, Sistema de Alerta de Deforestation (SAD), to analyze forest cover change. However, widespread use of this analysis has been hampered by lack of access to satellite imagery data and computational resources for processing.

What if we could offer scientists and tropical nations access to a high-performance satellite imagery-processing engine running online, in the “Google cloud”? And what if we could gather together all of the earth’s raw satellite imagery data — petabytes of historical, present and future data — and make it easily available on this platform?

By running high-speed five-minute satellite scans through a carefully designed computer algorithm, the scientists can quickly analyze cloud top temperature changes to look for signs of storm formation.

"[...] they can stay aloft for more than a week, whereas most drones fly for no more than 30 hours at a time. [...] even when punctured: the pressure of the helium inside a blimp is about the same as that of the air outside it, so the gas does not rush out. indeed, towards the end of 2004, when a blimp broke its tether north of baghdad and started to drift towards iran, the american air force had some difficulty in shooting it down."

A fairly comprehensive remote sensing introduction.

Welcome to the McIDAS Website. In existence since 1973, McIDAS (Man computer Interactive Data Access System) is a suite of sophisticated software packages that perform a wide variety of functions with satellite imagery, observational reports, numerical forecasts, and other geophysical data. Those functions include displaying, analyzing, interpreting, acquiring and managing the data.

Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ieee-earth.org