Sentinel-2

Road traffic noise represents a global health issue. Despite its importance, noise data are unavailable in many regions of the world. Such data are typically inferred through point measurements and complex physical models to simulate the propagation of noise. Since this process is unfeasible in many areas of the world, we therefore propose to approximate noise data from satellite imagery in an end-to-end Deep Learning approach. We train a U-Net segmentation model to estimate road noise based on freely available Sentinel-2 satellite imagery and existing road traffic noise estimates for Switzerland. ...

This project forms the logical extension of our previous project on the characterization of industrial plumes from remote sensing data. Instead of simply identifying and characterizing plumes, we utilize this information to estimate Greenhouse Gas emissions from fossil fuel-firing power plants. The idea is rather simple: we know that we can segment plumes and robustly distinguish them from natural clouds. For all European power plants, we know for any given time what their power generation rates are. We can therefore train a regression model to estimate the power generation rate from the extent of the observed plume for any given time. However, the apparent size of the plume is not only a function of the power generation process. Instead, it is a highly complex process that relies on environmental variables. To approximate these variables, we provide concurrent weather information, including ambient temperature, air pressure and wind speed to our regression model. ...

Exposure to air pollution has been shown to lead to adverse health effects. A major air pollutant is NO2, which, at the surface level, directly affects human health, and, at higher elevations, contributes to acidic rain and represents a precursor to greenhouse gases. While NO2 column densities in the atmosphere can be measured with satellite observations as provided by Sentinel-5P, it requires in-situ measurements from ground stations to measure NO2 concentrations on the surface level, which is relevant to human exposure. ...

Commercial vehicle traffic is currently responsible for 7% of global CO2 emissions. While road freight will remain the dominant mode of surface freight transportation, its contribution to climate change is likely to increase in the short term. Therefore, the quantitative monitoring of commercial vehicle (CV) traffic is essential for implementing targeted road emission regulations. However, ground monitoring stations are costly and less than half of all countries worldwide collect road freight activity. In this work, we investigate the feasibility of detecting and monitoring CV traffic in freely available satellite imagery from ESA’s Sentinel-2 satellites. ...

The industrial and power-generating economic sectors emit more than half of the annually and globally released greenhouse gas emissions, strongly contributing to global warming effects. In our recent work (Mommert et al. 2020) we laid the foundation to estimating greenhouse gas emissions from industrial sites by characterizing industrial smoke plumes from remote imaging data only. That work is part of a bigger effort to estimate greenhouse gas emission rates from satellite imagery for individual industrial sites. In this work, we made one further step towards achieving this goal. ...

The major driver of global warming has been identified as the anthropogenic release of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from industrial activities. The quantitative monitoring of these emissions is mandatory to fully understand their effect on the Earth’s climate and to enforce emission regulations on a large scale. In this work, we investigate the possibility to detect and quantify industrial smoke plumes from globally and freely available multi-band image data from ESA’s Sentinel-2 satellites. ...