In order to compare gravity measurements from space with flood information derived from earth observation satellites, a workflow for flood volume calculation based on the combination of SAR scenes during a flood and a digital elevation model (DEM) has been developed.
Here you can read our seventh Newsletter, simply click on the image below.
We would love to hear any feedback you might have on the content, so please do contact us if you have any comments!
On Friday the 25th of November, the geodesy institutes at TU Graz hosted the annual geoday, an outreach event targeted at students about to graduate high school. This year over 150 students from Graz and all over Styria (south eastern Austria) took the opportunity to get to know the courses of study, the geodesy institutes at TU Graz and their current research topics. The event is also always a great opportunity to spark interest in geodesy and show the public how the earth observation data we provide, through EGSIEM and other projects, can directly influence their everyday lives.
We are pleased to announce that the 2nd round of the EGSIEM student challenge has been started on 15.11.2016. In the first round of the challenge, we have had around 100 students from different European countries, who have been registered in the challenge. Thirty-seven B.Sc. and M.Sc. students have successfully passed the first challenge. Now, they have an opportunity to answer the second round questions. In the second round, students will be expected to provide written answers to 20 questions. This will involve some online study, but will also incorporate some textbooks which should already be familiar to students in the Geodesy, Hydrology, Geophysics and Geodynamics fields.
The deadline to submit your answers to the questions of the second round EGSIEM student challenge is 15.12.2016.
In our last article, we talked about why it was important to concentrate efforts in the right direction.
That might sound philosophical, but no… it was mathematical. The directions we are referring to are directions in the sense of linear algebra, i.e. the basis vectors of the space used for gravity field modeling. We illustrated how, if given a chosen dimension, we could improve the gravity solution by astutely choosing a set of basis vectors and the subspace generated by those vectors. We would then focus our efforts to search a solution inside this subspace.
Contributing to the ongoing efforts to reach GRACE baseline here we have investigated K- band range rate residuals. Range-rate residuals are dominated by the high frequency noise from the K-band ranging system. Further, we investigated the dominant error source in high frequencies. Our analysis shows that the high frequency errors (20-100 mHz) are due to low SNR values of K- band frequency of GRACE-B.
The EGSIEM student challenge is an initiative in the framework of the EGSIEM consortium. The aim of the challenge is to engage B.Sc. and M.Sc. geodesy, hydrology and other disciplines students around the European continent to be familiar with the climate change problem around the globe!
Once students have completed their registration at www.challenge.egsiem.eu (starts on 1st Oct. 2016) the first of two selection stages will involve 20 multiple-choice questions. This may sound a lot but the answers to these questions should be readily available online to students from a variety of different backgrounds. Once the students have completed the online test, and after the month-long first stage has taken place, those who have passed will be invited to take part in the second-round. This will involve more in-depth knowledge of Earth’s gravity field, hydro-gravimetry with the twin GRACE satellites and flood & drought monitoring.
In the second round of EGSIEM challenge, students will be expected to provide written answers to another 20 questions. This will again involve some online study, but will also incorporate textbooks which should already be familiar to students in the above fields.
Are you motivated to participate on the first round of EGSIEM student challenge, then register yourself now! The deadline for your participation in the 1st round of the EGSIEM challenge is 10.11.2016.
Here you can read our sixth Newsletter, simply click on the image below.
We would love to hear any feedback you might have on the content, so please do contact us if you have any comments!
EGSIEM is pleased to announce its latest publication:
The role of accelerometer data calibration within GRACE gravity field recovery: Results from ITSG-Grace2016, which has been written by B. Klinger and T. Mayer-Gürr of Technische University Graz and is published in the Journal Advances in Space Research
The full text is available at DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.asr.2016.08.007
GFZ Kalman-filtered daily GRACE gravity field solutions, computed on standard 2ºx2º equi-angular grids are now available for internal evaluation and verification. The grids are recursively predicted and consecutively updated by Poisson's integral over a set of radial basis functions in equi-areal surface tiles of available GRACE K-Band data and reduced dynamic GRACE orbits.
In the June 2016 issue of the quarterly UniPress magazine (produced by the University of Bern) the theme was on researching in networks. Perhaps I am a little biased when I say that EGSIEM is an excellent example of such research, as our network brings together researchers from different backgrounds (Geodesy, Hydrology, Crisis Management etc.).
Photo: © Manu Friederich/Universität Bern
At the last EGSIEM project meeting (held in Potsdam, Germany in June), Zhao Li (of the University of Luxembourg) reported that she had problems calibrating the positions of GRACE A and B satellites when introducing K-Band observations. After some extremely helpful discussions with Uli Meyer, Adrian Jäggi, and some hand holding by Matthias Weigelt (BKG - Bundesamt für Kartographie und Geodäsie) Zhao went back and checked the code step by step. After two months of extreme frustration, Zhao is now extremely happy and satisfied that she has found and solved the problems. Now she gets a reasonable GPS/KRR combined reduced-dynamic orbits for GRACE A and B for the test date 01/01/2006. This means that we are getting closer to our final target.
