These Satellites See Through the Clouds to Track Flooding
One day Joe Morrison, the vice president of a satellite company, gave members of his team a strange task: Go buy images from another company’s picture-taking spacecraft. He wanted to see how easy it was to exchange money for those orbital goods and services. So the group scampered off and ordered a satellite image of an area in Southeast Asia, to be taken within the next three weeks. They paid around $500. Easy.
Three weeks later, though, they’d only gotten radio silence. It turned out that the company had been unable to take a snap, and the broker had canceled their order. It was a high-demand area, of which many people wanted portraits. Plus, it was monsoon season, when clear shots were hard to come by. So instead, the company had tasked their satellite to take the image sometime within the next year.
To Morrison, this experience demonstrated much of what’s wrong with the “remote sensing” industry. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but that’s true only if you can get a shot in the first place. Clouds cover, on average, about two thirds of Earth. And at any given time, roughly half of the planet is dark. (This area’s experience is commonly referred to as “night.”) In either of those conditions, traditional satellite imagery is not worth many words at all. And if you want to buy many photos of the same area, tracking how things change, this gets difficult and expensive—unless you’re a defense department or spy agency with deep pockets and front-of-queue influence. That’s why Morrison hopes data from his employer—a company called Umbra, based in Santa Barbara, California—could fulfill what has long been remote sensing’s promise: The ability to monitor Earth, not just take infrequent static photographs of it.
