My very good friends are on a month long trip to Guatemala and they asked me to house/dog sit for them. It is not a bad gig considering it reduces my commute in half, they have a pool (a horse trough), a superior patio, and they left me homemade cookies. So I'm sitting back with a beer and my laptop and thought I would get a post out early. In other news I am giving a presentation at the Tucson GIS Coop on Friday around 3pm. It is about the mobile field recording system that I am implementing at work. It is powered by ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS Mobile. Hopefully the local community will get how easy and cheap it is to set something up like this. This is the first interview that I have had. It is interesting because you do not always get information out of someone as high a level involvement as Antonio Tajani. He brings up some interesting points comparing European and U.S. entrepreneurship in GNSS. I know I often put the responsibility of GIS/GPS onto government agencies, but I do agree with him that private sector investment is also required to get these larger programs started. It is kind of a one-two punch. Government funding in the investment start-up phase and private sector to create enough jobs to stimulate tax revenue back into the system. He also talks about the economic issues involved in expanding the Galileo system. They have four satellites active, but are looking to increase that number. While the economies of several companies are very slowly recovering, they are still depressed. As I wrote last week, many countries simply do not have the money to invest in a program like this. It will be great when more GNSS systems are put into place. He mentions the possibility of interoperability of Galileo with GLONASS and GPS. Having that many more satellites and base stations working together will be a significant advantage to surveyors and other field crews who rely on GPS/GNSS for their work. He also mentions that there is an opportunity for growth in the mobile market. I have already written about cell networks are increasing their accuracy. If GNSS systems can adjust the accuracy existing signal to mobile/tablet devices we could see an explosion of high precision/high accuracy documentation in non-professional users. We could see these crowd sourced projects perform on a level previously available only to surveyors.
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Cost in space: funding halt leaves satellites up in air
Something that a lot of citizens from economic powers take for granted is the ability for their government and private sector to accomplish 'the big stuff.' We read our news and see new government programs here, new private sector research there and they are all big budget. Other nations, despite having the technical expertise, do not always have the start up capital to get projects like these off the ground let alone budget for their maintenance. Engineers at the University of New South Wales in Australia have designed two earth observing satellites. One of these satellites can observe the moisture content of soil across the continent every three days. The problem though is that Australia does not maintain earth observation satellites. They do have telecommunication satellites operated in conjunction with private companies. For earth observation they currently use scenes from the U.S and Japan. These satellites "could be used by agriculture, conservationists, meteorologists and climate scientists." Like most countries Australia has been hit hard by droughts. Their agricultural production is being severely hurt because of rising temperatures and declining rain fall. These satellites could create a high temporal resolution of the soil moisture across their country. It would give them a significant insight in creating responses to localized irrigation needs. There are long term research benefits as well. Having a temporally detailed record of soil moisture will help establish a baseline for climate change research. Australia could create responses to greater continental level environmental needs. We will have to see how satellite technology progresses. If the technology becomes cheaper and governments with smaller GDPs can maintain their own systems the research potential could be staggering. |
AuthorI am a GIS professional in Walla Walla, WA. I use this blog to force myself to really read through all of the GIS news that I get in my inbox. It also helps me practice writing. Archives
January 2015
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