Satellites Can See Invisible Lava Flows and Lively Wildfires, However How? (Python) | by Mahyar Aboutalebi, Ph.D. 🎓 | Feb, 2024

Visualizing satellite tv for pc photographs captured over volcanos and wildfires in varied spectral bands

1. 🌟 Introduction
2. 🔍 Sentinel-2 (Spectral Bands)
3. 🌐 Downloading Sentinel-2 Pictures
4. ⚙️ Processing Sentinel-2 Pictures (Clipping and Resampling)
5. 🌋 Visualization of Sentinel-2 Pictures (Volcano)
6. 🔥 Visualization of Sentinel-2 Pictures (Wildfire)
7. 📄 Conclusion
8. 📚 References

🌟 Introduction

As it’s possible you’ll know, our eyes can solely see objects within the seen area (the bands of blue, inexperienced, and purple). Nevertheless, when mild hits an object and displays, it incorporates info in different spectral areas, equivalent to infrared. Infrared mild can successfully penetrate and move via dense gases, equivalent to smoke, offering a transparent view beneath the smoke. Nevertheless, Our eyes should not capable of see objects within the infrared area, not like some animals like snakes that may see a portion of infrared of their imaginative and prescient. Over the last a long time, there was vital development within the improvement of sensors for detecting infrared mild. These sensors have been utilized in sensible functions.

I’ve at all times been in search of an excellent instance for instance how satellites can detect essential info within the infrared area, which is invisible to our bare eyes. Final week, I learn concerning the Iceland volcano that had change into lively for the third time since December 2023. It sparked an thought in my thoughts to test the photographs captured by satellites over the volcano. I hoped to be fortunate sufficient to discover a clear satellite tv for pc picture of the smoke plume from the volcano, demonstrating how mild scatters within the seen area whereas penetrating via the smoke within the infrared area to disclose lava flows.

I checked a few satellites, and guess what? There was one with the proper timing! The volcano erupted on Thursday morning (Feb eighth), and the Sentinel-2 overpass occurred on Feb eighth round midday. I believed this may very well be an ideal instance to exhibit how…