On Tuesday the 21st February Professor Adrian Jäggi of the Astronomical Institute of the University of Bern (and leader of EGSIEM) was pleased to host a group of 12 students from the Gymnasium Kirchenfeld’s optional Astronomy course at the Zimmerwald Observatory just outside of Bern (a striking image of which appears on the front cover of EGSIEM Newsletter 5).

In autumn 2016, EGSIEM launched "The EGSIEM Student Challenge", a Europe-wide student competition, which provided a unique opportunity for young scientists to explore the worlds of geodesy, hydrology, flood/drought monitoring and emergency management. The goal of the competition was to educate students in geodesy, hydrology and emergency services, with a focus on EGSIEM research topics; to increase students' awareness of the importance of Earth observation and the usage of data for the monitoring and forecasting of natural hazards; and to awake students' interest, and curiosity in this field. The groups targeted were university students, both undergraduates and graduates, who were residents of the European Economic Area (EEA).

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.

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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.