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.
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.
Recent years have seen increase in hurricanes and subsequent flood damage to property throughout the U.S. due to climate change. CoreLogic® a leading global property information, analytics and data-enabled solutions provider, this week released its 2021 Hurricane Report, providing analysis of single- and multifamily residences along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts and revealing nearly 8 million homes with more than $1.9 trillion in combined reconstruction cost value (RCV) are at risk of storm surge. This year’s report also examines hurricane wind and reveals more than 31 million homes with nearly $8.5 trillion in combined RCV have moderate or extreme risk exposure to hurricane winds.
In a recent Media News Briefing and Q&A session with Airbus Defence and Space, SVP Head of Earth Observation, Navigation and Science, Philippe Pham & Director of Intelligence Business François Lombard discussed the announcement of Pleiades Neo. The company is reshaping earth observation services and geospatial services by introducing Pleiades Neo, their first satellite.
Evergreen in the Suez Canal, image courtesy of Airbus Defence & Space
While Bentley Systems has had an Academic Program for some time, it has been reawakened, according to Katriona Lord-Levins, chief success officer at Bentley. “It has been brought into the times we’re in, and to meet the needs that we have to create a talent pipelines for our customers and ourselves,” said Lord-Levins. “Not only do we want to help students develop their engineering skills that will help them in the real world, but we also want to get people excited about the possibilities of the future.”
Amritha Narayanan, Pix4Dcatch Product Manager, provided information on the new ViDoc RTK rover from Pix4D, an industry leader in photogrammetry. The company is announcing the commercialization and worldwide exclusive distribution of the viDoc RTK rover, enabling ground-based RTK-grade 3D scanning with iOS mobile phones and tablets through the Pix4Dcatch app.
Conceived by vigram GmbH., a German company led by professional surveyors, the viDoc RTK rover is designed for accuracy and works with Pix4Dcatch for image acquisition. The hand-held RTK rover is a replacement for more expensive ground surveying equipment but is no less accurate in its mission to to achieve 3D, actionable results. Users can couple the viDoc RTK rover to Pix4Dcatch via Bluetooth and connect to any NTRIP service of their choice. They can walk around their area of interest to acquire high-precision positional data for individual images.
This solution brings together the power of RTK accuracy with the combination of LiDAR and photogrammetry. It can be used with the following support devices: iPad Pro 11 2020, iPhone 12 Pro and iPhone 12 Pro Max equipped with LiDAR sensors.
Digital twins can play a role providing accurate, reliable data – fit-for-purpose and useful across the water infrastructure lifecycle. Gregg Herrin, vice president, water infrastructure at Bentley Systems discussed the Dodge Data Analytics Water Report.in a briefing with GISCafe Voice.
“The report is about 30 pages long and does highlight the range of maturity that we see across water utilities,” said Herrin. “many are a lot farther along in their journey of going digital. We see a lot that emphasizes the different silos that exist within those utilities as well. Whether those are departmental silos of different parts of the organization, not interacting or not getting as much value as they could from each other, or data silos where the systems that are being used aren’t as connected as they could be, to provide the types of insight that could be shared.”
In the report, Herrin said throughout the report there is an emphasis on the fact that there are technical challenges, but then there also are people challenges. The challenges are primarily about getting departments to work together more closely. There are challenges even around, people aging out of their company. Aging infrastructure gets worse over time. Aging staff provide a whole different set of challenges, but also some opportunities. There is a need for utilities to be able to bring their technologies together in a way that’s more open and more flexible so that they can get the things that are more insightful across those different departmental silos.
Better cloud and remote GIS tools, virtual and augmented reality have now blossomed in response to the demands put forth on our industry by the pandemic. Gaining access to analysis-ready geospatial data at a scale and with granularity never before possible is on the horizon. We thought we already knew about digital twins, but now we find out they are finally born? This is the way of the future and much more, we learn by checking in with companies Blue Marble and Omnisci, two companies with a finger on the pulse of what to watch for in geospatial.
Thematically, this week’s group of industry predictions can be boiled down to one topic: delivering the data that people need, in a format that they can understand to enable them to make the best possible evidence-based decisions quickly and confidently.
Geospatial has responded to the past year’s calamitous changes with what it already had in place as well as shifted gears at the spur of the moment. GNSS advancements, bring-your-own-data, geospatial data acquisition, location analytics, supply chain logistics, Covid and dashboards, tracking trends, turning data into actionable information – all took front and center stage as far as technologies that surge forward into 2021 and beyond.