Überblick

Die Forschungstätigkeiten in der Sektion Fernerkundung und Geoinformatik am GFZ umfassen verschiedene Bereiche. Zum einen werden Verfahren für die Informationsgewinnung aus großen, komplexen Datensätzen aus Fernerkundungs- und in-situ Sensoren, sowie aus Simulationsmodellen und Geoarchiven entwickelt. Dazu werden Methoden aus Data Mining/Machine Learning, visueller Datenexploration, Datenbanken und Big Data Technologien für die spezifischen geowissenschaftlichen Herausforderungen angepasst und weiterentwickelt. Einen weiteren Schwerpunkt bildet die wissenschaftliche Leitung der deutschen Hyperspektralmission EnMAP sowie die Definition von zukünftigen Satellitenmissionen. Hinzu kommt anwendungsorientierte Forschung zur Beobachtung bio- und geophysikalischer Parameter sowie Oberflächendeformationen mithilfe optischer und Radar-Fernerkundungssatelliten, welche für ein breites Spektrum wissenschaftlicher Anwendungsfelder von Interesse sind. Dazu zählen Bodendegradation, geologische Exploration, “Precision Farming”, die Vegetation in ihrer globalen Funktion, natürliche und anthropogene Gefahren sowie die Wechselwirkungen zwischen Landoberfläche und Atmosphäre.

Wir verfügen über besondere Kompetenz und Expertise in folgenden Bereichen

Section Highlights

2020

Appoinments, committees

Torsten Sachs takes part in the Expedition "MOSAiC - Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate" from January to May.
Daniel Spengler is now official representative and member of the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture – Competence Network for Digitization in Agriculture (Participation of 2^nd Competence Network meeting at Bonn, 03./04.03.2020)
Sabine Chabrillat is appointed Vice-chair of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society/ Standards Committee (GRSS/SC) Working Group; P4005 on 'Standard Protocol and Scheme for Measuring Soil Spectroscopy'; (https://sagroups.ieee.org/4005/)

Highly ranked publications

“Remote sensing of night lights: A review and an outlook for the future” is listed as one of the 25 most downloaded papers from Remote Sensing of Environment https://www.journals.elsevier.com/remote-sensing-of-environment/most-downloaded-articles
Shamshiri, R.,Motagh, M., Nahavandchi, H.,Haghshenas Haghighi, M., Hoseini, M. (2020): Improving tropospheric corrections on large-scale Sentinel-1 interferograms using a machine learning approach for integration with GNSS-derived zenith total delay (ZTD). - Remote Sensing of Environment, 239, 111608 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2019.111608
Milewski, R., Chabrillat, S., Bookhagen, B. (2020): Analyses of Namibian Seasonal Salt Pan Crust Dynamics and Climatic Drivers Using Landsat 8 Time-Series and Ground Data. - Remote Sensing, 12, 3, 474. https://doi.org/10.3390/rs12030474
Wolanin, A., Mateo-García, G., Camps-Valls, G., Gómez-Chova, L., Meroni, M., Duveiller, G., You, L., Guanter, L. (2020): Estimating and understanding crop yields with explainable deep learning in the Indian Wheat Belt. - Environmental Research Letters, 15, 2, 024019.; https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ab68ac
Bohn, N., Guanter, L., Kuester, T., Preusker, R., Segl, K.(2020): Coupled retrieval of the three phases of water from spaceborne imaging spectroscopy measurements. - Remote Sensing of Environment, 242, 111708; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2020.111708
Scheffler, D., Frantz, D., Segl, K.(2020): Spectral harmonization and red edge prediction of Landsat-8 to Sentinel-2 using land cover optimized multivariate regressors. - Remote Sensing of Environment, 241, 111723; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2020.111723
Beamish, A.L., Raynolds, M.K., Epstein, H., Macander, M.J., Frost, G.V., Bergstedt, H, Bartsch, A., Kruse, S., Miles, V., Tanis, C.M., Heim, B., Fuchs, M., Chabrillat, S., Shevtsova, I., Verdonen, M., Wagner, J. (2020), Recent trends and remaining challenges for optical remote sensing of Arctic tundra vegetation: A review and outlook, Remote Sens. Env., 246, 111872, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2020.111872

New science projects

Start of EnMAP 2020-2022 Scientific preparation and support of the hyperspectral satellite mission EnMAP. GFZ is coordinating a consortium of 4 partners with a total project budget of 3.0 Mio €. About 1.9 Mio budget for GFZ. Duration 01.01.2020 – 31.12.2022 with potential extension after satellite start. Scientifically GFZ will be mainly involved in mission coordination and preparation, sensor simulation (pre-launch), data quality and validation (after-launch), EnMAP Box development and user support, training and workshops, education initiative HYPERedu.
Start of the CHIME CCN1 E2E performance simulator project 2020. The main objective of this project is to develop an end-to-end (E2E) satellite simulator framework for the Copernicus Hyperspectral Imaging Mission for the Environment (CHIME) that is currently a candidate mission in the Copernicus Expansion Sentinel program. The project is done in cooperation with partners from the University of Valencia, Spain.
Start of TECVOLSA project: Tectonics and Volcanoes in South America with InSAR. The goal of this project is to develop an intelligent Earth Observation (EO) data processing system for monitoring earthquake cycle and volcanic events in South America. The project is done in cooperation with partners from German Aerospace Center (DLR ) and section 2.1

Technology transfer

Start of GFZ Helmholtz Innovation Lab - FERN.Lab. The 5-year funding (incl. project evaluation after 2.5 years) of 2.3 Mio € (50% of the project costs) enables the build-up of a physical lab, which is to establish itself as a technology platform for application-oriented, transdisciplinary method developments for the analysis of remote sensing data in the long term beyond the funding period.
Start of project AgriSens DEMMIN 4.0 (Test field (Experimentierfeld) for digitization in Agriculture initiated by BMEL) with focus on transfer. GFZ is coordinating the consortium of 8 partners with a total project budget of 3.5 Mio €. About 1.35 Mio budget for GFZ. Duration 02.03.2020 – 01.03.2023 with potential extension of +2 years. Scientifically GFZ will be mainly involved in RS data analysis / data synergy analysis for soil parameter estimation e.g. for optimization of irrigation.

2019

Appointments, committees

Sabine Chabrillat has taken over the position of the Scientific Principal Investigator of the EnMAP Mission
Mahdi Motagh has been appointed as member of the UNESCO Land Subsidence International Initiative LaSII
Sabine Chabrillat has been appointed as editorial board member for the journal Remote Sensing
Chris Kyba has been invited to the "Highlights der Physik" event with 4500 people in the audience. He discussed light pollution with the event moderator. The „Highlights der Physik“ is annually organized by the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF) and the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft (DPG) since 2001. http://www.highlights-physik.de
Mathias Bochow has been selected as one of ten German experts to the Sino-German Symposium on Microplastics, 9-10th July 2019 Beijing.
Mathias Zöllner represents GFZ in the „UAV DACH – Verband für unbemannte Luftfahrt“

Prizes, scholarships

Sophia Walther was awarded with the "Ernst Reuter Preis". She received the prize from the Freie Universität Berlin for her outstanding Phd Thesis „Assessment of the dynamics of terrestrial vegetation using satellite observations of greenness and sun-induced chlorophyll fluorescence”.
Friederike Körting won first place for the best audience poster award at the biannual workshop on hyperspectral remote sensing which is organized every two years by the Special Interest Group on Imaging Spectroscopy of the European Association of Remote Sensing Laboratories (EARSeL SIG-IS). Her poster is titled 'Proximal Hyperspectral Outcrop Scanning – A Geological Use Case Study'.
Friederike Klos was awarded third place for the best Young Scientist poster presentation at the biannual workshop on hyperspectral remote sensing (EARSeL-SIG IS) for her poster 'Hyperspectral Lithium-Pegmatite Detection - A Case Study for Hoydalen, Norway' and second place for the best poster audience award.
10th Anniversary Best Paper Award of MDPI journal „Remote Sensing“. Nominations from all papers published from 2009 to 2018 Rank 3 Award for: The EnMAP Spaceborne Imaging Spectroscopy Mission for Earth Observation. Authors: Luis Guanter, Hermann Kaufmann, Karl Segl, Saskia Foerster, Christian Rogass, Sabine Chabrillat, Theres Kuester, André Hollstein, et al. https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11151790
20th Anniversary Best Paper Selection of the International Journal of Digital Earth. Thirty papers originally published in the period from 2008 to the 2019 have been selected in a virtual special issue entitled “Digital Earth and Big Earth Data”. Paper: Challenges and strategies for the visual exploration of complex environmental data. Authors: Carolin Helbig, Doris Dransch, Michael Böttinger, Colin Devey, Antonie Haas, Mario Hlawitschka, Claudia Kuenzer, Karsten Rink, Christian Schäfer-Neth, Gerik Scheuermann, Tom Kwasnitschka, Andrea Unger
Niklas Bohn successfully applied for a DAAD scholarship for doctoral researches. He is going to visit the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, for a 7-months research stay starting in November 2019. Supervised by Dr. David Thompson, he will join the imaging spectroscopy group to continue working on his doctoral thesis.

Highly ranked publications

Sánchez de Miguel, A., Kyba, C., Aubé, M., Zamorano, J., Cardiel, N., Tapia, C., Bennie, J., Gaston, K.: Colour remote sensing of the impact of artificial light at night: The potential of the International Space Station and other DSLR-based platforms. In Remote Sensing of Environment. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2019.01.035
Saskia Foerster, Luis Guanter et al. edited a Springer review book on the state-of-the-art of spaceborne imaging spectroscopy entitled “Exploring the Earth System with Imaging Spectroscopy” including chapters led by Sabine Chabrillat and Luis Guanter. The book is published within the Space Sciences Series of ISSI (https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783030249090#aboutBook) and as special issue in the Surveys in Geophysics journal (https://link.springer.com/journal/10712/40/3/page/1).
Marc, O., Behling, R., Andermann, C., Turowski, J., Illien, L., Roessner, S., Hovius, N. (2019): Long-term erosion of the Nepal Himalayas by bedrock landsliding: the role of monsoons, earthquakes and giant landslides. - Earth Surface Dynamics, 7, pp. 107—128. DOI: doi.org/10.5194/esurf-7-107-2019
Veh, G., Korup, O., von Specht, S., Roessner, S., Walz, A., 2019. Unchanged frequency of moraine-dammed outburst floods in the Himalaya. Nature Climate Change, 9, 379-383, DOI; doi.org/10.1038/s41558-019-0437-5
Haghshenas Haghighi, M., Motagh, M. (2019): Ground surface response to continuous compaction of aquifer system in Tehran, Iran: Results from a long-term multi-sensor InSAR analysis. - Remote Sensing of Environment, 221, pp. 534-550. DOI https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2018.11.003
Walter, T. R., Haghshenas Haghighi, M., Schneider, F. M., Coppola, D., Motagh, M., Saul, J., Babeyko, A. Y., Dahm, T., Troll, V. R., Tilmann, F., Heimann, S., Valade, S., Triyono, R., Khomarudin, R., Kartadinata, N., Laiolo, M., Massimetti, F., Gaebler, P. (2019): Complex hazard cascade culminating in the Anak Krakatau sector collapse. - Nature Communications, 10, 4339.DOI: http://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-12284-5
Natali, S. M., Watts, J. D., Rogers, B. M., Potter, S., Ludwig, S. M., Selbmann, A., Sullivan, P. F., Abbott, B. W., Arndt, K. A., Birch, L., Björkman, M. P., Bloom, A. A., Celis, G., Christensen, T. R., Christiansen, C. T., Commane, R., Cooper, E. J., Crill, P., Czimczik, C., Davydov, S., Du, J., Egan, J. E., Elberling, B., Euskirchen, E. S., Friborg, T., Genet, H., Göckede, M., Goodrich, J. P., Grogan, P., Helbig, M., Jafarov, E. E., Jastrow, J. D., Kalhori, A. A. M., Kim, Y., Kimball, J. S., Kutzbach, L., Lara, M. J., Larsen, K. S., Lee, B., Liu, Z., Loranty, M. M., Lund, M., Lupascu, M., Madani, N., Malhotra, A., Matamala, R., McFarland, J., McGuire, A. D., Michelsen, A., Minions, C., Oechel, W. C., Olefeldt, D., Parmentier, F. W., Pirk, N., Poulter, B., Quinton, W., Rezanezhad, F., Risk, D., Sachs, T., Schaefer, K., Schmidt, N. M., Schuur, E. A. G., Semenchuk, P. R., Shaver, G., Sonnentag, O., Starr, G., Treat, C. C., Waldrop, M. P., Wang, Y., Welker, J., Wille, C., Xu, X., Zhang, Z., Zhuang, Q., Zona, D. (2019): Large loss of CO2 in winter observed across the northern permafrost region. - Nature Climate Change, 9, pp. 852-857 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-019-0592-8

Technology transfer

FERN.Lab (Remote sensing for sustainable resource use) initiated by Daniel Spengler, Julia Neelmeijer and Theres Küster will be funded by Helmholtz starting from 2020. It is intended to become a technology platform for developing and operationalizing practical transdisciplinary methods of using remote sensing data. The lab focuses on collecting geoinformation, especially from satellite data, to meet the specific requirements of companies, agencies, and NGOs.
Christian Mielke and Friederike Körting together with Martin Otto and Arndt Schwaiger founded the company rad. Data Spectral Analytics UG (haftungsbeschränkt). The company aims at the usage of remote sensing and imaging spectroscopy applications in the mining sector from multiple remote sensing platforms. This way innovative solutions are provided to the mining industry for a more cost effective and sustainable resource discovery and recovery.

2018

Appointments, committees

Luis Guanter and Sabine Chabrillat have been appointed as member of the „Mission Advisory Committee for the ESA candidate mission CHIME (Copernicus Hyperspectral Imaging Mission for the Environment)“
Mahdi Motagh has been appointed as guest Professor for Radar Remote Sensing at Wuhan University in China.
Mahdi Motagh has been appointed as editorial board member for the journal Remote Sensing
Mike Sips has been selected as one of five German experts to the Transatlantic Dialogue „Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and Cybersecurity“ in Ottawa, Canada, by „The Canadian German Chamber of Industry & Commerce“.
Katrin Kohnert has been selected as a reviewer for the IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate (group review organized by the Association of Polar Early Career Scientists)
Mathias Zöllner has been selected as a member of the VDI/DIN-Kommission Reinhaltung der Luft (KRdL) – Normenausschuss – Mitglied der Arbeitsgruppe NA 134-02-01-50 UA „Meteorologische Messungen – Unbemannte Fluggeräte“

Prizes, scholarships

Sabine Chabrillat, Robert Milewski and Stephane Guillaso received the Best Paper Award at the 9th Workshop on Hyperspectral Image and Signal Processing Evolution in Remote Sensing ‘Whispers’ 2018, held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, from 23 to 26 September. https://doi.org/10.1109/WHISPERS.2018.8747219
Katrin Kohnert won Best Poster Award for early career scientists 15th International Circumpolar Remote Sensing Symposium, Potsdam
Section 1.4 received the GFZ „Innovationspreis“ for its activities in technology transfer regarding remote sensing for geology and agriculture

Highly ranked publications

Kyba, Ch, Is light pollution getting better or worse? In: Nature Astronomy. DOI http://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-018-0402-7
Kyba, Ch., Kuester, T., Sánchez de Miguel, A., Baugh, K., Jechow, A., Hölker, F., Bennie, J., Elvidge, C. D., Gaston, K. J., Guanter, L.: „Artificially lit surface of Earth at night increasing in radiance and extent“ https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/11/e1701528 Science Advances has been listed in the „Altmetric top 100“ in 2018: https://www.altmetric.com/top100/2018
Behling, R., Milewski, R., Chabrillat, S. (2018): Spatiotemporal shoreline dynamics of Namibian coastal lagoons derived by a dense remote sensing time series approach. - International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation, 68, pp. 262—271. DOI: doi.org/10.1016/j.jag.2018.01.009
Veh, G., Korup, O., Roessner, S., Walz, A., 2018. Detecting Himalayan glacial lake outburst floods from Landsat time series. Remote Sensing of the Environment 207, 84–97 DOI https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2017.12.025
Wang, T., Shi, Q., Nikkhoo, M., Wei, S., Barbot, S., Dreger, D., Bürgmann, R., Motagh, M., Chen, Q. (2018): The rise, collapse, and compaction of Mt. Mantap from the 3 September 2017 North Korean nuclear test. - Science, 361, 6398, pp. 166-170. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6398/166
Moreno, M., Li, S., Melnick, D., Bedford, J., Baez, J. C., Motagh, M., Metzger, S., Vajedian, S., Sippl, C., Gutknecht, B., Contreras-Reyes, E., Deng, Z., Tassara, A., Oncken, O. (2018): Chilean megathrust earthquake recurrence linked to frictional contrast at depth. - Nature Geoscience, 11, pp. 285-290 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-018-0089-5
Kohnert, K., Juhls, B., Muster, S., Antonova, S., Serafimovich, A., Metzger, S., Hartmann, J., Sachs, T. Toward understanding the contribution of waterbodies to the methane emissions of a permafrost landscape on a regional scale-A case study from the Mackenzie Delta, Canada. - Global Change Biology, 24, 9, pp. 3976-3989. https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.14289
Unger, A., Dräger, N., Sips, M., Lehmann, D. J. (2018): Understanding a sequence of sequences: Visual exploration of categorical states in lake sediment cores. - IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 24, 1, pp. 66-76. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2017.2744686