Satellites Can See Invisible Lava Flows and Energetic Wildfires, However How? (Python) | by Mahyar Aboutalebi, Ph.D. 🎓 | Feb, 2024
Visualizing satellite tv for pc photos captured over volcanos and wildfires in numerous spectral bands
- 🌟 Introduction
- 🔍 Sentinel-2 (Spectral Bands)
- 🌐 Downloading Sentinel-2 Photos
- ⚙️ Processing Sentinel-2 Photos (Clipping and Resampling)
- 🌋 Visualization of Sentinel-2 Photos (Volcano)
- 🔥 Visualization of Sentinel-2 Photos (Wildfire)
- 📄 Conclusion
- 📚 References
🌟 Introduction
As you could know, our eyes can solely see objects within the seen area (the bands of blue, inexperienced, and pink). Nevertheless, when gentle hits an object and displays, it accommodates info in different spectral areas, equivalent to infrared. Infrared gentle can successfully penetrate and go by means of dense gases, equivalent to smoke, offering a transparent view beneath the smoke. Nevertheless, Our eyes are usually not in a position to see objects within the infrared area, in contrast to some animals like snakes that may see a portion of infrared of their imaginative and prescient. Over the past many years, there was vital development within the growth of sensors for detecting infrared gentle. These sensors have been utilized in sensible functions.
I’ve at all times been in search of a very good instance as an instance how satellites can detect essential info within the infrared area, which is invisible to our bare eyes. Final week, I learn concerning the Iceland volcano that had change into energetic for the third time since December 2023. It sparked an thought in my thoughts to examine the pictures captured by satellites over the volcano. I hoped to be fortunate sufficient to discover a clear satellite tv for pc picture of the smoke plume from the volcano, demonstrating how gentle scatters within the seen area whereas penetrating by means of the smoke within the infrared area to disclose lava flows.
I checked a few satellites, and guess what? There was one with the proper timing! The volcano erupted on Thursday morning (Feb eighth), and the Sentinel-2 overpass occurred on Feb eighth round midday. I believed this may very well be an ideal instance to display how…
