Spectropolarimetry of life: Airborne measurements from a hot air balloon

Does life exist outside our Solar System A first step towards searching for life outside our Solar System is detecting life on Earth by using remote sensing applications. One powerful and unambiguous biosignature is the circular polarization resulting from the homochirality of biotic molecules and systems. We aim to investigate the...

Semantic Segmentation of RGB-Z Aerial Imagery Using Convolutional Neural Networks

Semantic segmentation (or pixel-level classification) of remotely sensed imagery has shown to be useful for applications in fields as mapping of land cover, object detection, change detection and land-use analysis. Deep learning algorithms called convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown to outperform traditional computer vision and...

Monitoring land restoration projects of Justdiggit in Kenya, using downscaled passive microwave remote sensing products of VanderSat

The growing world population and climate change have resulted in increasing stress on the Earth’s ecosystems. Especially the overexploitation of agricultural land, overgrazing and extreme droughts have resulted in land degradation, often called desertification. This leads to the disappearing of natural vegetation, the loss of soil quality, lower...

Predicting the ungauged basin: Model validation and realism assessment

The hydrological decade on Predictions in Ungauged Basins (PUB) led to many new insights in model development, calibration strategies, data acquisition and uncertainty analysis. Due to a limited amount of published studies on genuinely ungauged basins, model validation and realism assessment of model outcome has not been discussed to a great...

Observing groundwater depletion in Northern Iraq from space: A comparitive study between catchment hydrology and the GRACE satellite mission

Mass changes derived from GRACE satellite data indicate that there is a large water mass loss in Northern Iraq between 2006 and 2009. In the same period Northern Iraq suffered a severe drought , which is likely to be the main driving factor behind those water mass losses. But where does this mass change exactly come from? Is it groundwater or...