An international team of climate scientists led by Penn State University have created a computer program that automatically analyzes satellite images and other data to help climate scientists keep track of complex, constantly changing environmental conditions. The program uses probability to analyze and extract environmental information from satellite images and sensor data about ocean structures to recognize changing conditions. The research appears in the current issue of IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing.
The automated systems has been tested on satellite images provided by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer of sections of oceans in the Iberian Atlantic, the Mediterranean coast and near the Canary Islands. The tests included 1,000 cases of real ocean features, including 472 upwellings, 119 cloudy upwellings, 180 wakes, 10 anticyclonic eddies, 40 cyclonic eddies and 180 misclassified regions. The best combination of filter and classification method developed by the researchers accurately identified the ocean features more than 89 percent of the time.
This project was partially supported by Spain’s Ministry of Education and Science, with ongoing funding from the National Science Foundation’s cyber-enabled discovery program.
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