GISCafe Geospatial Technology Wrapup – 2021

Much of 2021’s important news had to do with digital twin technology, responding to climate change and artificial intelligence, as well as Covid-19 response for businesses. Reducing the world’s carbon footprint is a major priority for most organizations and technologies are being lined up to address this priority.

Digital Twins are one of those technologies. Recognizing that 70% of the world’s carbon emissions come from cities, and digital twin technology may hold the key to reversing this, according to company materials from CityZenith.

A recent Markets & Markets report estimated the Digital Twin market would grow from $3.1 billion in 2020 to $48.2 billion per year by 2026, at an annual CAGR of 58%. Digital Twin software is already revolutionizing industries such as Construction, Energy, Architecture, Aerospace, and Automotive & Transportation.

Lamina Tower, Saudi Arabia

Furthermore, the global Smart Infrastructure market is forecast to grow to $56b over the next four years, an annual growth rate of 19.5%, according to Market Research Explore.  The report for the global Smart Infrastructure market named Cityzenith, Siemens, and Black & Veatch, as the leading companies in the sector.

Cityzenith just landed a large project in Saudi Arabia on the Red Sea. The Lamina Tower is under construction at the Jeddah Corniche resort on the Red Sea in Saudi Arabia, and with premium 10,000 ft² units revealing unobstructed views of the Red Sea from all rooms. It is billed to be one of the most luxurious residential properties in the country.

Cityzenith’s contract with the Lamina Tower makes it the first of its type in the Middle East to use a Digital Twin to optimize and enhance marketing and sales, daily operations, and the overall tenant experience.

In addition, Cityzenith’s AI technology platform specializes in energy resilience and has recently launched an international campaign to help cities become climate-friendly under the banner of its Clean Cities – Clean Future campaign.   Cityzenith will donate its SmartWorldPro2 solution to up to 100 cities over the next three years to help them become carbon neutral.

In a conversation with Cityzenith CEO Michael Jansen, he remarked that cities product more than 70% of greenhouse gases and that the use of data and artificial intelligence could reduce this footprint dramatically.

Observing nature, in the form of high tides, and particular “perigean spring high tides,” is a very accurate way of assessing how climate change affects our planet within the microcosm of the salt marsh. On January 4, 2018, which coincided with a perigean spring high tide (Perigean tides occur when the moon is either new or full and closest to Earth), a single storm moved ice onto an area of salt marsh in Massachusetts from nearby creeks and bays, carrying the equivalent of more than 15 years’ worth of sediment onto the marshes. Also, prior to the event, there was a prolonged cold snap that lasted for more than a week when temperatures never climbed above 32 degrees.

In response to this event, researchers at Boston University are using high resolution aerial photography to investigate how important coastal ecosystems like salt marshes are responding to climate change. The study focused on that area of salt marsh in Massachusetts. Using high resolution aerial photography from Bluesky, researchers were able to examine the deposits in detail recording measurements of deposit’s distribution and total cover.

Bluesky recently completed a second survey of the site to map depressions in the marsh surface, called potholes, which demonstrate how the salt marsh is responding to rising sea level.

Salt marshes maintain elevation with rising sea level, in part by trapping mud and sand. The storm deposit was a consequence of prolonged ice formation followed by a strong nor-easter coinciding with a very high tide. While the temperatures were low for an extended period of time, ice formed in shallow water, and mud and sand froze to its base at low tide. The cold spell combined with the very low tides meant that the ice was especially thick and full of sediment when the storm moved in onto the marsh.

Salt marshes are among the most productive ecosystems providing a range of benefits including carbon sequestration, wildlife habitat and protection from storm surges and flooding. Coastal wetlands are progressively more at risk from the effects of climate change such as increasing carbon dioxide levels and rising temperatures. However, the primary impact is from rising sea level, which salt marshes are extremely vulnerable to due to their low, flat elevation.

Bluesky Geospatial undertook the original survey of the Parker River Wildlife Refuge in Newburyport, Massachusetts following a period of extended low temperatures, which caused prolonged ice formation, followed by strong winds and an extremely high tide. 300 exposures were captured using a large format, digital aerial photogrammetric camera which were processed to produce seamless coverage of the 130 km2 site at 10 centimeter resolution. The follow up survey was undertaken during early April 2021. The Bluesky aerial photomaps are shared with Boston University for analysis using the ArcMap Geographical Information System (GIS).

Professor Duncan M. FitzGerald of the Department of Earth and Environment at Boston University said, “We used the aerial photography to map the ice-rafted sediment that was deposited on the marsh surface. Some these ice rafts were the size of cars, whereas others coalesced into are that size of football fields.”

“Our major finding was that storm event such as this one deposits as much sediment on the marsh surface as 15 years of normal marsh deposition,” said Professor Zoe Hughes of the Department of Earth and Environment at Boston University.

The Urgency for a Sustainable Future

Jack Dangermond, president, Esri

The theme of the Esri User Conference 2021 was “GIS: creating a sustainable future.” President Jack Dangermond talked about how this theme was inspired by Mario Palma’s book Why inegi? who said that lack of understanding of our reality is one of the greatest risks that our society is facing.

He also said, “our future depends upon creating and applying that understanding.”

These were the beacons that started inegi, but are beacons that address the work done by Esri users – creating and applying understanding.

Geologists are beginning to call this the “Anthropocene epoch,” as human activities are beginning to dominate.

Human induced climate change and over population are resulting in interconnected patterns of change, steep declines in biodiversity, and many other factors. Humans are living recklessly without regard for the environment.

“If we want to change to become more sustainable we need to change and make a commitment to life, and our future and must act now,” said Jack. “Many things can be done: restoring efficiencies, reducing pollution, looking at it geographically. It requires we see the world as one single ecosystem. Geography provides the science and the language of our world to be able to do this. It helps organize and integrate all the factors like environmental factors like biodiversity and integrate with social systems, illuminates patterns and relationships and helps us to provides a framework for understanding and applying our knowledge.”

Laura McNulty, National Government Sciences Manager from Esri manages Esri the National Health, Government and Sciences Team, that supports NTIA, FDC, and many other science and health based federal agencies.

Thomas Gibbs, National Government Sciences at Esri, is a team lead on the Department of Commerce with responsibilities from an account perspective over NTIA, a role he has held since the beginning of the project and program.

Getting broadband to people in need is a key part of responding to Covid-19, disaster preparedness and climate change. AI is being used by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) that released a new publicly available digital map that displays key indicators of broadband needs across the country based on Esri technology. This is the first interactive, public map that allows users to explore different datasets about where people do not have quality Internet access.

According to press materials, the public “Indicators of Broadband Need” tool released puts on one map, for the first time, data from both public and private sources. It contains data aggregated at the county, census tract, and census block level from the U.S. Census Bureau, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), M-Lab, Ookla and Microsoft. Speed-test data provided by M-Lab and Ookla help to illustrate the reality that communities experience when going online, with many parts of the country reporting speeds that fall below the FCC’s current benchmark for fixed broadband service of 25 Mbps download, 3 Mbps upload. This is the first map that allows users to graphically compare and contrast these different data sources.

• In helping in the analytical data processing NTIA utilized Artificial Intelligence in deploying the Esri’s Big Data Toolkit (https://www.esri.com/en-us/arcgis/products/spatial-analytics-data-science/capabilities/real-time-big-data-analytics)to process the large datasets:  (NTIA’s – National Broadband Availability Mapping Program (NBAM) supports over 252 data services and layers across 45 data partners having processed over several TeraBytes of data (4TB currently).  NTIA is one of the first federal agencies to utilize this unique geospatial AI Big Data Toolkit to analyze such large data sets derived from the program. Eg.  Ookla SpeedTest data massive files (1-2TB) that provide the necessary granularity for more detailed broadband analysis of underserved and unserved communities.
• NTIA NBAM is hosted in a secure Esri cloud infrastructure leveraging both the Esri ArcGIS Online Mapping Platform and the Esri Managed Cloud Services FedRAMP environment.   NBAM efforts were non-stop and seamless enhancing the systems and application tools thorough the pandemic in early 2020 and 2021 due to remote access through the secured cloud infrastructure.

Sanjay Gangal, CEO and president of GISCafe, interviewed Ross Smith, program manager at TCarta, to talk about the importance of TCarta and its satellite-derived bathymetry, or SDB to climate change, sea level rise and GEOINT.

TCarta is a hydrographic and hydrospatial remote sensing company that specializes in the marine domain using space-based sensors for C4 mapping, C4 specification and primarily, satellite-derived estimation mapping and satellite-derived bathymetry, or SDB.

What is Project Trident? 

“Project Trident is a National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation Research grant,” says Smith. “We’re currently in phase two, and the whole scope of the project is to really try and bring satellite-derived bathymetry into the modern world with machine learning, deep learning and some level of automation and taking a lot of the common detractors and difficulties of satellite-derived bathymetry and turn them into technical solutions. The primary focus is using multiple space-based sensors in order to derive a global bathymetry model of the shallow waters around the world. So it’s entering the end of the third year now and we’re very excited about it.”

CEO Jensen Huang presented the keynote at the recent GTC21 NVIDIA Conference, November 8-11, sharing with the audience the importance of accelerated computing and much more. As the GIs industry relies more heavily on AI technology, the rapid advancements made by NVIDIA will have more impact on the industry.

One of the most profound announcements came at the end of the talk, wherein Huang announced that they are building a digital twin of the earth.

“Accelerated computing starts with NVIDIA CUDA general-purpose programmable GPUs,” Huang said. “The magic of accelerated computing comes from the combination of CUDA, the acceleration libraries of algorithms that speed-up applications, and the distributed computing systems and software that scale processing across an entire data center. We have been advancing CUDA and the ecosystem for 15 years and counting.”

What this means is NVIDIA optimizes across the “full-stack”, iterating between GPU, acceleration libraries, systems, applications, continuously, all the while expanding the reach of their platform by adding new application domains that they accelerate.

Robots, AV fleets, warehouses, factories, industrial plants, and whole cities will be created, trained, and operated in Omniverse digital twins.

“We will build a digital twin to simulate and predict climate change. The last supercomputer we built was called Cambridge 1, or C-1. This new supercomputer will be E-2,” said Huang. “Earth Two – the digital twin of Earth, running Modulus-created AI physics, at Million-X speeds, in Omniverse.

All the technologies we’ve invented up to this moment are needed to make Earth Two possible. I can’t imagine a greater and more important use.”

How these various organizations are responding to climate change, Covid-19 and other social and health challenges, with digital twins, AI and machine learning, demonstrate the persistent power of geospatial as we advance forward into 2022.

May your holiday season be blessed with health and good cheer. See you in 2022!

Tags: ArcGIS, climate change, cloud, data, ESRI, GIS, health, imagery, Infrastructure, intelligence, location, mapping, maps, mobile, mobile mapping, satellite imagery

Categories: 3D Cities, analytics, Big Data, climate change, cloud, Covid-19, data, Esri, field GIS, geospatial, GIS, government, mapping, mobile, remote sensing, resilient cities, sensors, spatial data, utilities

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