Featured Article

Building a Consolidated Community Global Cropland Map

A new Sub-Task on Agricultural Mapping is building a living, community-based consolidated cropland map. The aim is to provide the agricultural monitoring, food security and land use change communities with a better cropland product than currently exists. The product is freely available to researchers and the general public.

See et al., posted on January 24th, 2012
Agriculture, Earth Observation, Featured Article

Education Around Earth – Analyzing the Spatial Distribution of 4 Crops with a Geographic Information System

For centuries, maps have stirred imaginations and inspired explorations of the unknown. For the past 40 years, GIS has quietly transformed everyday decision making in academia, government, nonprofit, and in business through the manipulation of satellite imagery, maps, graphs, databases, and multimedia in a decision-making framework. Agriculture was one of the first fields to embrace GIS, applied to everything from precision agriculture to invasive weed eradication to sustainable practices.

Joseph Kerski, posted on September 23rd, 2009
Agriculture, Articles, Education, Featured Article

Benefits of GEOSS: A Panel Discussion

There are over six billion people on this planet, 193 countries and more than five thousand languages. No matter the nationality or language spoken or the location, everyone is inextricably linked and hence affected by global environmental change.

Paul Racette, posted on November 17th, 2008
Earth Observation, Featured Article, GEOSS/ICEO News, Technology

A Brief History Of Radio – Echo Sounding Of Ice

The application of radio-echo sounding (RES) to thickness measurements of glacial and sheet ice has been demonstrated since the early 1960s. The concept for this approach can be traced to 1933 at Admiral Byrd’s base, Little America, Antarctica where the first indication that snow and ice are transparent to high frequency radio signal was observed.

Christopher Allen, posted on September 26th, 2008
Articles, Earth Observation, Featured Article, Technology

Changing Sun, Changing Earth

How and why does the Sun’s energy change, and how does the Earth respond? We care about these changes, and seek improved understanding of their causes and consequences. We do this because society urgently seeks to quantify anthropogenic and natural causes of climate change, because we are increasingly reliant on the technological benefits of space assets, and because we utilize and explore extensive environmental domains well beyond the surface where we live.

Judith Lean, posted on August 28th, 2008
Articles, Earth Observation, Energy, Feature, Featured Article, Weather

For The Benefit Of Society

Given the IEEE’s technical scope and global presence, our 375,000 members have a tremendous opportunity to contribute. In fact, our members are already involved in a number of such projects. For example, the IEEE Committee on Earth Observation has since 2005 been involved in the International Group on Earth Observations and its effort to create a Global Earth Observation System of Systems.

Lewis Terman, posted on May 29th, 2008
Earth Observation, Featured Article, GEOSS/ICEO News, OpEd, Technology

Panorama of the East Coast

This Jan. 29 panorama of much of the East Coast, photographed by one of the Expedition 30 crew members aboard the International Space Station, provides a look generally northeastward: Philadelphia-New York City-Boston corridor (bottom-center); western Lake Ontario shoreline with Toronto (left edge); Montreal (near center). An optical illusion in the photo makes the atmospheric limb and light activity from Aurora Borealis appear "intertwined." Image Credit: NASA