Science (4) - Meditations
Explore posts from the Descartes Labs team.
Rise of the Living Supply Chain
Synthetic Aperture Radar image of the the Port of Shanghai: the busiest port in the world and ground zero for most of the world’s supply chains Supply chain is an interesting term. What is it? It...
Measuring Volcanic Earth Displacement Using Interferometric SAR
Figure 1: An interferogram from a pair of collections made during descending passes. The fringes to the left are surface deformations centered to the east of the Kilauea summit and lava lake. The...
Global-scale water monitoring in the cloud
The many shapes and colors of water, from a silt-laden river in Louisiana to Lake Mead, Nevada to the Great Salt Lake, Utah. All images from the Sentinel-2 satellite. Water plays many roles in our...
Assessing the damage of California’s wildfires
Over the past week, we’ve watched in horror as wildfires tore across Northern California. With a deep data archive of satellite imagery and expertise in remote sensing, we also wondered what we could...
Multi-dimensional Choropleth Maps using PostGIS, GeoServer, and Google Earth
A choropleth map is a “thematic map in which areas are shaded or patterned in proportion to the measurement of the statistical variable being displayed on the map, such as population density or...
Fighting Wildfires Using a Cloud-based Supercomputer
In the wake of yet another season of significant wildfire activity across the US and in particular California, our drought-weary states brace for the start of a new wildfire season that will once...
Mapping the land from space (in the Cloud)
There are at the very least six separate global land cover mapping efforts. The European Space Agency (ESA) just released an unprecedented 24 annual global land cover maps as a part of the Climate...
Using Petabytes of Pixels with Python to Create 3 New Images of the Earth
Today we’re excited to share three new satellite imagery-based maps of the earth, made here at Descartes Labs. These are global composite images constructed using data from the Landsat 8,...