IGARSS 2011 Vancouver - Redux (So that you don't fall asleep)

It took a lot of messing around and changing flights to get there but thanks to the excellent folk at Flight Centre Melbourne Airport I arrived on time , left Melbourne 25th July Morning 10:30am and arrived in Vancouver 25th July 7:30am. Again proving the fact that a teleporter is indeed equivalent to a time machine.

This monday turned out to be full-on 48hour monday, lots of interesting sessions to go to. I attended the plenary by Shimada San introducing ALOS-2 and ALOS-3 with next generations of the great optical and SAR sensors we have come to expect from the Japanese. May be I can sneak into the CALVAL stage and score another trip to Japan.

More flight dramas continued in the background, the presentations blurred into a constant stream of words and diagrams on my sketchbook in the foreground. I learnt a lot about what has been done in the past year and what is coming over the horizon.

I saw science solving political problems with cross-boundary river basin monitoring with Poseidon, Jason-1 and in the future Jason-2. Important basins across unfriendly countries such as Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra and the Mekong can be monitored by the international science community and appropriate alerts sent and action taken when one of the partner nations or the weather in the river basin begins to misbehave.

I saw the cold-gas (NO2) driven engines that keep TerraSAR-X and Tandem-X locked in their helical dance, not forever, only till the global elevation model project is complete or the gas runs out - whichever comes first. Some extra effort will be required to collect the elevation model of Antarctica, since the satellites will need to be rolled to face left. This is where the polar observation satellites - Cryosat-2 and more, will make a great impact.

I used the conference services a fair bit as well and got labelled "the troublemaker" - thanks people. If you want to get in touch with me just search for the troublemaker at IGARSS.

The real highlights of the week however were the impromptu dinner get-togethers. After the poster session on Monday I drifted off with SAR people from Spain and a few other places. Tuesday night was spent with the OTB team and a fun Columbian guy from ITC. Scientists on one night, engineers on another, we discussed the transition from Science to Engineering to Products, and the effort and mindsets it takes to go the next step, and how the last step provides continuing fuel for the first. The next night it was back to science setting up a collaboration aimed at just such a transition for the OTB ESA Summer of Code in Space (ESA SOCIS 2011). Thursday evening I had great stroll through the Sun Yat Sen garden, dinner at Shukaku and a movie at the Scotiabank Theatre - ultimate self indulgence. Friday, went to very few sessions and spent most of the time in Stanley park sketching totem poles, before catching a flight out. Thank you for a great time Vancouver - I will definitely be back.

Waving around in MEEP - Scheme and Python

I finally get to learn some proper functional programming with MEEP and its Scheme based interface. MEEP is an FDTD - Finite Difference Time domain based simulator for electromagnetic waves, something I am trying to shoehorn into vegetation simulation. There is thankfully prebuilt cylinder primitives I can use to generate stems. So far I have managed put them in the Z and X axis and not in the Y axis which is of interest to me. The ring demo runs fine with some modifications and produces some nice and weird looking waves. Scheme is pretty easy to get around as a scripting interface, in spite of some polish math notation ( + (+ (+ (air water) earth ) fire ) = hooray !!)

I also got the Python bindings up and running. Time to see if my Python generated plant geometries and soil surfaces can be plugged straight into a 2D MEEP run. MEEP supports cylinder, ellipse, cone and block primitives. Making plants will be fairly easy, may be I can make the soil surface with dielectric blocks of random size.

Wind profiling with Radars - ARRC

Had the inaugural lecture for the ARRC - Adelaide Radar Research Centre. It is trying to create collaboration between the Physics department and the Electronics Engineering department to make - well more radars of all sorts. The physics department at Adelaide has had several RF greats including the famous Braggs. Prof Iain Reid the Executive Director of ATRAD showed off the long history of wind profiling arrays at Buckland Park and other sites. They seem to have a huge number of installations at Chinese launch sites to control manned launches of the Long March.

Here are some interesting tid bits:

1) Full atmosphere coupled models work better for weather system modelling than lower atmosphere only models.
2) Atmosphere has Inertial,Bouyant and Viscous layers which influence its observability by VHF radar.
3) The region not observable by radar can be observed using lidar at multiple frequencies, there is a sodium band at the upper atmosphere which can be used for measurements. UV Lasers will have best response for most of the atmosphere.
4) Networked radars are the big new thing thanks to the popularity of the BOM site ( following on from the last post) and is driving the development of more wind profilers so that the atmospheric radars can be dedicated to precipitation observation.
5) Big radars are hard to build due to power constraints in remote areas like the outback and Antarctica, so they are being forced to become more economical. Pansy built by Japanese Universities in the Antarctica may include solar power or something similar, or a forest of Bonsai trees with electrical generation units and antennas plugged into them.

On that happy note we finished the talk on watching winds with electromagnetic waves.

PIRR Review - Radars are everywhere

Last week I attended the PIRR (Progress in Radar Research) workshop sponsored by DSTO. As expected it was full of DSTO employees from various parts of the country as well as some University people.

Zheng Shu from  CSIRO CMIS had the most relevant presentation pertaining to my research area. CSIRO and UNSW are developing techniques for combined use of Landsat and PALSAR for forest monitoring in Tasmania.

There were also talks dense with applied mathematics and beam forming. Some where people were tracking artillery shells with HH/VV radar, even though the shell is symmetric and did not have much difference in cross-section in the 2 polarizations. Then interesting spotlight views of ships from Ingara.

I also saw a very small and neat K-band (24 Ghz) dual-pol patch antenna used for termite detection. Getting closer to a flying radar in the lab then, hope there are no termites around.