Across the table, across the country, and across the Globe!
It is 01:00 EDT now on April 22, 2012 after a long day of developing and brainstorming. About 19 hours earlier morning we encountered a near monsoon on the way to the Miami Space Apps Venue, the Engineering Center We started the event off a little later than expected, but with out a hitch! The 3 judges each gave short presentations today, each relating to a particular set of challenges. Dr. Krish Jayachandran discussed the Agroecology Department at Florida International University and the prospect of growing vegetables in space. Shortly after, Dr. Shimon Wdowinski, a Geophysicist at the University of Miami, reviewed Geodesy in the 21st century, which a particular focus on radar acquisitions to measure changes in the earth’s surface. To wrap things up, an Astrophysicist from the Physics department at FIU, < a href=” http://casgroup.fiu.edu/physics/pages.php?id=3287 “>Gopal Bhatta, enthusiastically discussed Blazars and very distant galaxies.
The even more fun part came in the afternoon. That is when we had the opportunity to speak with Stratos and the group in Melbourne followed almost immediately by Lyle in Canberra. We met up with Rama and the Jakarta group later in the evening. It was really fun to see, speak and learn from each of the various groups that we linked up with. The google+ hangout with Astronaut Ron Garan was also a ton of fun; truly brought the idea of international collaboration to light, when people from 10 cities and 5 continents connected simultaneously to watch as four cities in Australia presented their final products.
The Miami location did not have the same squadron of media soldiers and volunteers as some of the much larger venues, which limited us in some cases. But we persevered. My co-lead organizer for the Space Apps Miami, Stephanie Long, helped to run the event and made sure the participants were fed and I managed the cross-site coordination, served as one of the two subject matter experts, and participated with our App development team. All of which made it a much more thrilling event to be a part of.
Our group decided to tackle the Satellite-based estimation of watershed-level evapotranspiration. The length of the challenge name itself tells you that it is a difficult but important solution to undertake. We began by a brief scientific briefing from the two organizers, both graduate students pursuing degrees in Hydrogeology. This is what I love doing, telling people about the importance of water and understanding the water budget and the huge impact that we have on such a precious NON-RENEWABLE resource, at least at the rate of our current water consumption. This was followed by identifying the participant’s skills and grouping them by their programming language skills and tasked their responsibilities accordingly. One group was in charge of data acquisition, one was responsible for data conversion and the last was tasked with data visualization. The final project will be a combination of Pearl, MATLAB, and C# languages. We decided on this format to make sure we included all the participants, even for those with only beginner programming skills (which was really just me).
We encountered a few issues while undertaking satellite ET and water storage challenge. Much of the conversation revolved around data collection and processing, as the Landsat 5TM data we used are large, multi-file datasets in addition to being in a difficult format to program for (at least using the expertise of our participants). My familiarity with satellite data and got us through the collection. The atmospheric corrections and ET modeling were done conjunctly with our Rocky Mountain participant in Boulder, the MATLAB expert, and me. However, we have encountered a problem with translating the output GeoTIFF to something that our data viz programmer can work with. We hope to take care of this issue, this morning April 22, 2012.
I have yet to get any sleep during the event (and the day before too), yet I am really excited about finishing our project tomorrow and showing our “Hydro” team off to the world! Our final submission will go in at 1600 Eastern (USA) time. I will leave you with this last photo taken at 0500 Sunday morning.
Cheers,
David