USA

Farmland is often a battleground in the fight against climate change. Solar panels and energy crops are pitted against food production, while well-intended policy choices can create incentives for farmers to till up new lands, releasing even more heat-trapping gas into the atmosphere. That’s why strategies for sustainable plant-based fuels focus on marginal lands — ...

ESA’s EarthCARE satellite, poised to revolutionise our understanding of how clouds and aerosols affect our climate, has been launched. This extraordinary satellite embarked on its journey into space on 29 May at 00:20 CEST (28 May, 15:20 local time) aboard a Falcon 9 rocket from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, US. Just 10 ...

NASA’s “Wildfire Digital Twin” project will equip firefighters and wildfire managers with a superior tool for monitoring wildfires and predicting harmful air pollution events and help researchers observe global wildfire trends more precisely. The tool, developed with funding from NASA’s Earth Science Technology Office and NASA’s FireSense Program, will use artificial intelligence and machine learning ...

NASA has selected Carbon-I, a proposal to map carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) emissions globally at a higher-than-ever resolution, as a finalist for an upcoming space mission. Carbon-I, which is short for the Carbon Investigation, was among four proposals selected to receive $5 million for a one-year feasibility study. After the feasibility studies are ...

The geology along Ecuador’s Coca River is moving in fast-forward. In a scientific field where natural wonders form over millennia, but natural disasters occur in minutes, speed is less than desirable. Over the last four years, the river and its surrounding area within the Amazon basin have experienced a lava dam collapse, 500 million tons ...

Google DeepMind introduced a new AI assistant model named Astra at their Google I/O developer conference. Astra is designed to be a highly functional AI assistant capable of understanding and responding to complex and dynamic environments. It aims to be proactive, teachable, and personal, allowing for natural and lag-free interactions. This groundbreaking technology is expected ...

The UK has successfully tested quantum-based navigation systems in flight. This commercial trial, led by the quantum technology firm Infleqtion, aims to enhance resilience against GPS jamming and spoofing. Although GPS jamming typically does not affect an aircraft’s flight path, Quantum-based Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) systems aim to provide accurate and resilient navigation, complementing ...

At its annual Google I/O 2024 conference, Google announced that users will soon be able to access geospatial augmented reality (AR) content directly on Google Maps on their phones. The feature will first appear in Singapore and Paris as part of a pilot program launching later this year. Users will be able to access the ...

NASA has selected four proposals for concept studies of missions to help us better understand Earth science key focus areas for the benefit of all including greenhouse gases, the ozone layer, ocean surface currents, and changes in ice and glaciers around the world. These four investigations are part of the agency’s new Earth System Explorers ...

The UK government has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Government of Ontario, Canada, to share knowledge and technology related to creating digital maps of underground infrastructure. The agreement was signed by Viscount Camrose, Minister for Intellectual Property, and Kinga Surma, Minister of Infrastructure with the Government of Ontario. The MoU outlines a ...

The University of Florida’s Center for Landscape Conservation Planning (CLCP) and GeoPlan Center have developed two new tools to support land protection decisions in Florida – a web map viewer and web-based dashboard for the Florida Ecological Greenway Network (FEGN). The FEGN is a statewide database that identifies and prioritizes a functionally connected statewide ecological ...

One natural strategy to reduce heat-related deaths is to increase tree coverage in urban areas, which helps lower temperatures. A recent study highlights the disparities in health and energy consumption across the United States, stemming from insufficient urban tree coverage. It also details the potential health and economic advantages that increased tree presence can offer ...

When scientists look at the Earth’s available water for ecosystem services, they don’t just look at precipitation. They must also account for water moving from the ground to the atmosphere, a process known as evapotranspiration (ET). ET includes evaporation from soil and open water pools such as lakes, rivers, and ponds, as well as transpiration ...

On April 27, 2024 the SpaceX Falcon 9 medium-lift launch vehicle launched into orbit Galileo satellites GM25 and FM27 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This was Falcon 9’s 20th and final launch. The EU Agency for the Space Programme (EUSPA) confirmed in a statement that it is now in the Launch and Early Orbit ...

AWS recently announced the availability of the Internet Weather Map, a new feature of CloudWatch that displays a 24-hour global snapshot of internet latency and availability outages. This new map offers a worldwide perspective on Internet conditions, allowing users to zoom in and analyze performance and availability problems in specific cities or with particular service ...

Esri, the global leader in location intelligence, in its partnership with Impact Observatory, has released an updated global land-use/land-cover map of the world based on the most up-to-date 10-meter Sentinel-2 satellite data. In the update, the Sentinel-2 10m Land Use/Land Cover Time Series includes new data from 2023, expanding the series to include global coverage ...

A team of international scientists involving the Durham University Geography department has unveiled a new map of the geological provinces hidden beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet. This comprehensive synthesis, published in Geophysical Research Letters, promises to advance our understanding of this critical component of the global climate system. The new subglacial geology map provides an ...

The Overture Maps Foundation today launched the first beta of its global open map dataset. With this, the foundation, which is backed by the likes of Amazon, Esri, Meta, Microsoft and TomTom, is getting one step closer to launching a production-ready open dataset for developers who need geospatial data to power their applications. “This Beta ...

In a collaborative move with the W3C Consortium, Siemens and Microsoft have announced their commitment to converge the Digital Twin Definition Language (DTDL) with the Thing Description standard from international standards organization, W3C. By unifying both languages, customers are offered consistent modeling experiences, mitigating fragmentation in an evolving IoT landscape. With customers typically deploying a ...

Researchers from the University of Alaska Fairbanks have developed a new technology using synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) to detect hazardous sections of open water in frozen rivers in Alaska during winter. This technology can also be applied across the Arctic, where open water zones pose similar dangers. By identifying these open water zones, researchers hope to ...

Energy modellers and researchers have developed a geospatial mapping model they say can help address the electricity access gap in Africa. The model has been developed by the International Energy Agency (IEA), researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Massachusetts Amherst and Electricity Growth and Use In Developing Economies. By mapping which buildings are ...

Wildfires present complex socio-economic and ecological challenges, as they devastate vegetation, endanger communities, and cause extensive environmental, wildlife, and human health impacts. These consequences include severe air pollution and soaring firefighting costs. Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) areas, which are transition zones between wilderness and human-developed land, are particularly susceptible to wildfires. The risk is heightened due ...

Organic agriculture may be as old as dirt, but that doesn’t mean its impacts are fully understood. A team of scientists in the United States and Canada are doing their part to change that. Researchers at UC Santa Barbara, University of British Columbia, and University of Colorado Boulder discovered that organic farming significantly affects the ...

To accelerate efforts to combat the $140 billion in economic losses due to extreme weather brought on by climate change, NVIDIA today announced its Earth-2 climate digital twin cloud platform for simulating and visualizing weather and climate at unprecedented scale. Part of the NVIDIA CUDA-X™ microservices, announced separately today, Earth-2’s new cloud APIs on NVIDIA ...

Trimble and Radiodetection announced today a collaboration to improve the technology used in the utility measurement and mapping process. Through the integration of the Trimble® Catalyst™ DA2 GNSS system and Radiodetection’s RD MapTM+ application and precision locator products, the software and hardware integration streamlines utility-locating workflows to provide high-accuracy measurement capabilities for the creation of ...

In a Sacramento office building, university students carefully scan pieces of paper that underpin California’s most contentious and valuable water disputes. One by one, they’re bringing pieces of history into the digital era, some a century old and thin as onion skin. The massive undertaking will unmask the notoriously opaque world of California water. Right ...

Iceye, a company that builds and operates a constellation of microsatellites equipped with synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensors, has launched a new maritime surveillance product called Ocean Vision. The service, announced March 7, aims to provide comprehensive monitoring of the world’s oceans. SAR satellites detect the signatures of vessels that stand out against the dark ...

Fujitsu Limited and Carnegie Mellon University today announced the development of a new technology to visualize traffic situations, including people and vehicles, as part of joint research on Social Digital Twin that began in 2022. The technology transforms a 2D scene image captured by a monocular RGB camera (1) into a digitalized 3D format using ...

Scientific Systems has released upgrades for ImageNav, an image-based navigation software designed for GPS-denied or compromised environments. With more than a decade of development, ImageNav offers a robust alternative to traditional GPS navigation for military operations, particularly in contested environments where jamming poses a threat to GPS reliability. The demand for such technology has become ...

Google Maps has become an invaluable tool to navigate and to find the best spots to eat, get coffee, or to see sights. But with some bigger buildings and attractions, it can get hard to find the entrance. That’s where a new experiment comes in that Google appears to be testing with a few users ...