Performance and Early Results from the Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT) Imaging Spectroscopy Mission

The Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT) acquires new observations of the Earth from a state-of-the-art, optically fast F/1.8 visible to short wavelength infrared imaging spectrometer with high signal-to-noise ratio and excellent spectroscopic uniformity. EMIT was launched to the International Space Station from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on July 14, 2022 local time. The EMIT instrument is the latest in a series of more than 30 imaging spectrometers and testbeds developed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, beginning with the Airborne Imaging Spectrometer that first flew in 1982. EMIT's science objectives use the spectral signatures of minerals observed across the Earth's arid and semi-arid lands containing dust sources to update the soil composition of advanced Earth System Models (ESMs) to better understand and reduce uncertainties in mineral dust aerosol radiative forcing at the local, regional, and global scale, now and in the future. EMIT has begun to collect and deliver high-quality mineral composition determinations for the arid land regions of our planet. Over 1 billion high-quality mineral determinations are expected over the course of the one-year nominal science mission. Currently, detailed knowledge of the composition of the Earth's mineral dust source regions is uncertain and traced to less than 5,000 surface sample mineralogical analyses. The development of the EMIT imaging spectrometer instrumentation was completed successfully, despite the severe impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. The EMIT Science Data System is complete and running with the full set of algorithms required. These tested algorithms are open source and will be made available to the broader community. These include calibration to measured radiance, atmospheric correction to surface reflectance, mineral composition determination, aggregation to ESM resolution, and ESM runs to address the science objectives. In this paper, the instrument characteristics, ground calibration, in-orbit performance, and early science results are reported. © 2023 IEEE.

Effects of the Pandemic on Observing the Global Ocean

The years since 2000 have been a golden age in in situ ocean observing with the proliferation and organization of autonomous platforms such as surface drogued buoys and subsurface Argo profiling floats augmenting ship-based observations. Global time series of mean sea surface temperature and ocean heat content are routinely calculated based on data from these platforms, enhancing our understanding of the ocean's role in Earth's climate system. Individual measurements of meteorological, sea surface, and subsurface variables directly improve our understanding of the Earth system, weather forecasting, and climate projections. They also provide the data necessary for validating and calibrating satellite observations. Maintaining this ocean observing system has been a technological, logistical, and funding challenge. The global COVID-19 pandemic, which took hold in 2020, added strain to the maintenance of the observing system. A survey of the contributing components of the observing system illustrates the impacts of the pandemic from January 2020 through December 2021. The pandemic did not reduce the short-term geographic coverage (days to months) capabilities mainly due to the continuation of autonomous platform observations. In contrast, the pandemic caused critical loss to longer-term (years to decades) observations, greatly impairing the monitoring of such crucial variables as ocean carbon and the state of the deep ocean. So, while the observing system has held under the stress of the pandemic, work must be done to restore the interrupted replenishment of the autonomous components and plan for more resilient methods to support components of the system that rely on cruise-based measurements. © 2023 American Meteorological Society.

Machine learning-based IoT system for COVID-19 epidemics

The planet earth has been facing COVID-19 epidemic as a challenge in recent time. It is predictable that the world will be fighting the pandemic by taking precautions steps before an operative vaccine is found. The IoT produces huge data volumes, whether private or public, through the invention of IoT devices in the form of smart devices with an improved rate of IoT data generation. A lot of devices interact with each other in the IoT ecosystem through the cloud or servers. Various techniques have been presented in recent time, using data mining approach have proven help detect possible cases of coronaviruses. Therefore, this study uses machine learning technique (ABC and SVM) to predict COVID-19 for IoT data system. The system used two machine learning techniques which are Artificial Bee Colony algorithm with Support Vector Machine classifier on a San Francisco COVID-19 dataset. The system was evaluated using confusion matrix and had a 95% accuracy, 95% sensitivity, 95% specificity, 97% precision, 96% F1 score, 89% Matthews correlation coefficient for ABC-L-SVM and 97% accuracy, 95% sensitivity, 100% specificity, 100% precision, 97% F1 score, 93.1% Matthews correlation coefficient for ABC-Q-SVM. In conclusion, the system shows that the process of dimensionality reduction utilizing ABC feature extraction techniques can boost the classification production for SVM. It was observed that fetching relevant information from IoT systems before classification is relatively beneficial. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Computing is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Assisting in the choice to fill a vacancy to compose the PROANTAR team: Applying VFT and the CRITIC-GRA-3N methodology

Antarctica is the southernmost continent of our planet, and it has been verified as the coldest region on earth. The Brazilian Antarctic Program (PROANTAR) has as its main objective the promotion of high-quality scientific research in the Antarctic region, seeking to understand the events that occur there. PROANTAR, coordinated by the Navy Commander, has some sectors that are based in Brazil and others that are located in the Antarctic continent. The military that volunteers to occupy any vacancy that is allocated to that continent needs, besides passing through several pre-established criteria, to pass the selection process. The purpose of this article is to help the Naval Administration in the selection of volunteer officers to occupy a vacancy in the Antarctic continent. To obtain the alternatives, the officers that best fit the established vacancy, and the criteria to be evaluated, Value-Focused Thinking (VFT) was applied. Next, with all the necessary data, the CRITIC-GRA-3N method was used as a Multicriteria Decision Support (MDS) technique, the CRITIC-GRA-3N method, the CRITIC Importance Through Intercriteria Correlation (CRITIC) method to obtain the criteria weights and the Grey Relational Analysis (GRA) method, with three normalizations, to order the alternatives. At the end of the application of the methods, the article can generate five ordinations of the volunteer officers to occupy the vacancy offered in PROANTAR. © 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.

Trilateral Water Quality Monitoring from Space during Covid-19

In order to control the spread of the pandemic of Corona-Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), lockdowns of various durations and intensities have been established in many countries over the world all through the year 2020. The trilateral dashboard jointly implemented by NASA, JAXA and ESA aims at exploiting remote-sensing data to evaluate the impact of these restrictions, and subsequent recovery phases on many different environmental, agriculture and economic indicators. More specifically, this paper presents the indicators implemented to monitor the impact of COVID-19 restrictions on Water Quality, together with preliminary analysis results over a few Areas of Interest. © 2021 IEEE.

Vida Decision Support System: An International, Collaborative Project for COVID-19 Management with Integrated Modeling

The Vida Decision Support System (Vida) is an application of the Environment-Vulnerability-Decision-Technology (EVDT) integrated modeling framework specifically aimed at COVID-19 impact and response analysis. The development of Vida has been an international collaboration involving multidisciplinary teams of academics, government officials (including public health, economics, environmental, and demographic data collection officials), and others from six states: Angola, Brazil, Chile, Indonesia, Mexico, and the United States. These collaborators have been involved with the identification of decision support needs, the surfacing and creation of relevant data products, and the evaluation of prototypes, with the vision of creating an openly available online platform that integrates earth observation instruments (Landsat, VIIRs, Planet Lab's PlanetScope, NASA's Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center, etc.) with in-situ data sources (COVID-19 case data, local demographic data, policy histories, mobile device-based mobility indices, etc.). Vida both visualizes historical data of relevance to decision-makers and simulates possible future scenarios. The modeling techniques used include system dynamics for public health, EO-based change detection and machine learning for environmental analysis, and discrete-event simulation of policy changes and impacts. In addition to the direct object of this collaboration (the development of Vida), collaborators have also benefited from sharing individual COVID-19-related insights with the network and from considering COVID-19 response in a more integrated fashion. This work outlines the Vida Decision Support System concept and the EVDT framework on which it is based. The international team is using Vida to evaluate the outcomes in several large cities regarding COVID cases, environmental changes, economic changes and policy decisions. It provides an overview of the overlapping and diverging needs and data sources of each of the collaborating teams, as well as how each of those teams have contributed to the development of Vida. The current state of the Vida prototypes and plans for future development will be presented. Additionally, this work will discuss the lessons learned from this development process and their relevance to other integrated applications. Copyright © 2021 by the International Astronautical Federation (IAF). All rights reserved.

IAA Decadal Assessment of Space Solar Power: A Progress Report

Space solar power (SSP) - first practically proposed in 1968 by Dr. Peter Glaser - is the concept of harvesting sunlight in space and delivering it wirelessly to receivers on Earth. During 2008-2011, the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) conducted the First International Assessment of Space Solar Power, a study that was published following successful peer review and has since become a standard reference. Now, the Academy is conducting a decadal update of this first-of-a-kind international study during 2018- 2022. (Note: the study was originally planned to conclude in 2021, but has been delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.) Key topics being examined by this study include: (1) changes in critical infrastructure since 2011;(2) advances in key technologies;(3) comparative assessment of various systems concepts that have been put forward;and, (4) emerging changes in the global market for new energy sources (including both energy for Earth and energy for space applications). The current paper reviews the progress to date on the decadal assessment, including process, team and the preliminary results. © 2021 International Astronautical Federation, IAF. All rights reserved.

Space for Earth and Climate Change – Public Value in a Risk Society

Today our society is confronted with the consequences of a triple crisis, a health crisis, an economic crisis and a climate crisis. Years of progress to reduce poverty and social divide, global cooperation, and efforts to combat climate change are threatened by an abrupt change in our livelihoods. Indeed, responses to the COVID-19 pandemic led to increased tensions between states. However, if challenges emanating from these trends emphasise on the need to anticipate future risks and define measures to mitigate them, they also raise new opportunities, especially for the space sector to show its contributions to the greater good of the society. As part of a research project in partnership with the University of Central Lancashire, the European Space Agency, undertook an analysis aimed at measuring the wider than economic value created by ESA programmes and activities as perceived by the European citizens. The results revealed a positive contribution to the common good. This paper will now present an innovative approach to public value management, to take stock of the results found and use it in its wider policy and resource settings to maximise its contribution to the society, and mission and mandates. At a time of existential crisis in which the anticipation of climate catastrophe caused by mankind drives public perceptions, policy and politics, this public value approach to optimising the impact of Space for Earth, brings imagery and insights into the everyday lives of ordinary citizens. Using public value and the risk society framework to unlock the potential of satellite imagery and information, we show how the impact of ESA’s Space for Earth missions may be optimised. We do this by focusing upon the existential risks associated with climate change to the constellation of universal human value categories, which now bear upon everybody, everywhere. The practicality of this presentation will be to draw upon high-resolution images from inter alia Copernicus, to show the impact of humanity upon the natural environment. This paper will further give insights for action and communication essential to mobilise citizens in the co-production of solutions to mankind’s most pressing problems. Copyright © 2021 by the International Astronautical Federation (IAF). All rights reserved.

One Health and human health

The "One Health" concept emphasizes interdisciplinary, cross-sectoral, and cross-regional communication and cooperation to achieve unity of health for humans, animals, and the environment. The One Health strategy is designed to provide early warning and effective preventative monitoring for emerging and reemerging infectious diseases. Since the avian flu crisis in the Asia-Pacific region, the World Organization for Animal Health and the World Health Organization have been working together to provide strong leadership to endorse the One Health concept and promote interagency and intersectoral collaboration. While the COVID-19 epidemic has been a major disaster for mankind, it has also resulted in a broad consensus on the concept of One Health among governments and international organizations, emphasizing action to jointly deal with common problems facing human health. Climate change, fragmentation and pollution of habitats, and the consequent loss of biodiversity and degradation of the natural environment threaten Earth's ecosystems. These changes also drive the emergence of infectious diseases, with negative health outcomes for humans, animals, and the environment. Historically, interventions in human and agricultural health problems did not always consider wildlife or environmental health, which has led to unintended consequences. One Health recognizes the interdependence of humans, animals, and the environment, and provides a conceptual framework for the development of interventions to optimize outcomes for human-animal-environmental health. However, it is necessary to clearly articulate the core values, goals, and objectives of One Health for all relevant sectors to maximize synergies in communication, coordination, collaboration, and, ultimately, joint action on disease control and prevention. The application of systems and harm reduction methods, focusing on the socio-economic and environmental determinants of health and ensuring good governance and effective leadership, will also maximize the opportunities to create "win-win" solutions for global health and environmental challenges. These solutions will help drive One Health to achieve its full potential and optimize health outcomes for all. In recent decades, One Health has become increasingly recognized around the world-i.e., that supporting a multisectoral, collaborative One Health strategy is the best way to address health threats at the human-animal-environmental level. The One Health method is increasingly popular in the context of the growing threats of climate change, emerging zoonoses, and antimicrobial drug resistance. During the last decade, country after country has implemented the One Health method and has shown benefits;the concept of One Health has become the international standard for zoonotic disease control. This call for transdisciplinary collaboration among professionals in human, animal, and environmental health has achieved multiple successes in zoonotic disease control, surveillance, and research. This article gives an overview of the development and application of One Health in addressing current issues, including emerging infectious diseases, antibiotic resistance, environmental health, and foodborne diseases. © 2022, Science Press. All right reserved.

What we Talk about when we Talk about Earth on Earth Day?

April 22, 2021, marked the 51st anniversary of Earth Day. With the growing imperativeness of environmental protection and sustainability, we want to study people's collective attention and conversations on this themed day. What are the top-of-mind discourses and central topics about the earth? How do people feel about them, hopeful or pessimistic? How do they change over time, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic? To answer these, we extracted and quantified top frequent features, co-occurring hashtags, sentiment words, and latent sub-topics from about 300K tweets posted on the Earth Day of 2009, 2013, 2017, and 2021. The results demonstrated the longitudinal dynamics of people's rhetoric and focus regarding protecting the earth - from resources conservation to climate changes, as well as the plummeted optimism toward environmental topics after the pandemic. The findings of our paper can help decision-makers to better assess the "voices of the people"and inform evidence-based decision-making. © 2021 ACM.