Category: Arctic Data Committee

Posts related to the work and progress of the Arctic Data Committee

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Oil spill west of Norilsk as seen by Sentinel-2

diesel on river Ambarnaya

The spill has happened from the white round containers grouped on the bottom of this large zoom of the river Ambarnaya flowing from the bottom left corner towards the lake on the top.

The precise diesel images are already nicely captured by ESA:

https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2020/06/Arctic_Circle_oil_spill

But here are images grabbed from CreoDias. First the still clean green tinted stretch close to the Pyasino lake outflow to the top of the image of this small river that opens up to two paths in this image from the 23rd May. There is still some lake ice on the small ponds around the river.

Clean Ambarnaya river
Clean Ambarnaya river

Next the stretch is visible on 31st May with diesel visible.

diesel on river Ambarnaya
diesel on river Ambarnaya

And finally the diesel has progressed further towards the lake on 1st June. The image is just from the border of the satellite swath.

Let’s hope the diesel can be stopped before entering the lake! If you want to investigate yourself, try this link to CreoDias browser. You can play around with different channels and make their weight change in the script.

UPDATE: Planet released a very clear looking image of the extent of the oil spilled. Many small water ponds south-east of the river that flows from the collapsed tank have red content clearly visible.

https://planet-pulse-assets-production.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2020/08/norilsk_20200604_106b_rgb_corrected_detail_1920_wm-1024×576.jpg

c Planet Labs Inc, 2020

Image was originally posted in this post: https://www.planet.com/pulse/clashing-eastern-superpowers-explosions-in-the-middle-east-dark-fishing-fleets-and-more/

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Third Polar Data Forum concluded with advances in search and semantics

Third Polar Data Forum Group Photo

Helsinki hosted a wonderful Polar Data Forum. It was the third time ever and it had a new record audience at 150 participants in Forum sessions and over 30 extras in a closely related side-event. The first two days were packed with the conference having 36 presentations and 17 lightning talks. A great breadth of actions across the globe on three poles, technical for the most, but some even touching social matters. In conclusion we might say that in matters of data management remote areas of this world pay a lot of attention.

The next days two days 9 partly parallel sessions drilled practically into broad policy, detailed semantics and federated search topics. Sessions dedicated to data interoperability, Marine data, NASA Icesat2 mission and EU Polar data policy fleshed out progress and knowledge transfer in many directions. Attendance was in total about half of that of the conference, but most praise I heard afterwards came from this part.

Friday was then dedicated to business meetings of the Arctic Data Committee and the Standing Committee of Antarctic Data Management. They mixed at times to have actions well linked up. The ADC meeting sparked off a new direction for a potential new working group (currently Federated Search and Semantics): One for Analysis Ready Data from Earth Observation (=satellite data). Anyone is welcome to join, we especially hope anyone that is hosting Arctic EO data would join this group.

Thanks a bunch for everybody at Helsinki last week!