| LATEST RSSRG NEWS |
| ...also available here with older items |
 Images/photos credit: Charlotte Robinson, Anabelle Erskine and Jake Weiss. Also from https://solace2020.net, © 2021 SOLACE and from https://mnf.csiro.au |
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| SOLACE voyage successfully completed! R/V Investigator back in Hobart on 16th January 2021 |
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| January 2021 On 4th December 2020, RSSRG's Research Scientist Charlotte Robinson embarked on the CSIRO research vessel Investigator for the 6-week SOLACE research voyage in the Southern Ocean. SOLACE stands for Southern Ocean Large Areal Carbon Export. This project is led by ARC Laureate Fellow Pr. Philip Boyd from University of Tasmania. A reduced contigent was onboard because of the Covid19 situation, yet the voyage could fullfil most of the initial objectives, including the full suite of optical measurements that RSSRG was in charge of. The general aim of the voyage is to develop an approach to quantify the changing effectiveness of CO2 sequestration by the biological pump that can be implemented using remote-sensing of the ocean surface by satellites and its interior by autonomous vehicles (especially BGC-Argo autonomous profiling floats). Read more here Back to top of page |
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 Image from http://getfarming.com.au/ |
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| A new staff member joins RSSRG | New RSSRG success with the ARC discovery scheme |
A new project on application of satellite ocean colour to the Oysters Aquaculture |
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| November 2020 Dr Eriita Jones has joined RSSRG as a part-time Research Fellow, working on a project funded by the Western Australian Satellite Technology and Applications Consortium (WASTAC) Small Grants Scheme. The project is going to look at the connection between Land Use Land Cover (LULC) and water quality in Estuaries of Western Australia, using satellite remote sensing. It includes collaboration with the WA Department of Water and Environmental Regulation (DWER). Get to know Eriita a bit more here |
November 2020 RSSRG has been awarded an ARC Discovery project (2021 round, D. Antoine lead CI), entitled Why ocean deserts matter: Phytoplankton carbon and productivity in oligotrophic waters of the Indian Ocean. This project will analyse data collected during our 2019 research voyage on R/V Investigator, with the main objective of reassessing the role of oligotrophic oceans in the global ocean carbon cycle. More soon on our web pages. See here |
December 2020 RSSRG has been awarded a project by the SmartSAT Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) (lead CI D. Antoine). This is a pilot project that is going to explore the potential of satellite ocean colour remote sensing in helping the oysters aquaculture Industry to identify potential future sites for growth of their activity, and for monitoring in real time the water quality on the farming sites. Read more about SmartSAT here Back to top of page |
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| A bundle of RSSRG's grants! | RSSRG wins an IMOS "New Technology Proving" grant |
A PhD grant available to work with us | ||||
| June 2020 RSSRG members have won 3 grants from the recent WASTAC small grant call. One project is about remote sensing of flowers in WA related to honey harvesting (lead P. Fearns/T. Campbell), another one about cloud climatologies for Australia (lead M. Lynch) and still another one about the links between land use and land cover (LULC) and water quality in WA estuaries. Read more here for the LULC project Read more here for the Bee's research Read more here for the cloud climatology project |
July 2020 RSSRG got selected for funding as part of the IMOS 2020 "New Technology Proving" call. The funded project is named Seamless and future-proof satellite ocean colour data for Australia, and is about generation of multi-sensor gridded ocean colour satellite products for Australia seas. More soon on our web pages. IMOS website here |
August 2020 RSSRG proposes a PhD project on mapping phytoplankton functional types in the seas around Australia. The selected candidate would get a Curtin scholarship to do this work as part of RSSRG's activities. Hurry up!! deadline for application is 1st September. Read more here Back to top of page |
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| Bee's and remote sensing | RSSRG part of a winning bid to the ARC Special Research initiative on Excellence in Antarctic Research | Measurement uncertainties and Monte Carlo methods | ||||
| April 2020 Tristan Campbell, who is close to completing his PhD with Peter Fearns RSSRG, has published a paper in the Remote Sensing journal, where they predict honey harvests in SW of Western Australia using machine learning and remotely-sensed observations. Really innovative stuff! Read more here |
April 2020 RSSRG is part of a large consortium of Australian Universities, research intitutions and international partners in a successful bid to the Australian Research Council's Special Research Initiative (ARC SRI) in Excellence in Antarctic Science, announced by the Minister for Education on 21 April. This project, led by the University of Tasmania, has been awarded $20 million over three years to establish the Australian Centre for Excellence in Antarctic Science, .. Read more here |
April 2020 RSSRG has published an innovative paper in the Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology (American Meteorological Society), where Monte carlo techniques are used in assessing uncertainties in measurements of under-water radiometric quantities, avoiding approximations normally impairing such assessments when dependencies among multiple sources of uncertainties are ignored. Read more here Back to top of page |
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| IMOS 2020 Annual Planning Meeting, Hobart | Thetis redeployed! | IMOS STAR task team report published | ||||
| March 2020 IMOS has been having planning meetings every year since inception. These meetings are the occasion for the community involved in IMOS to gather, to assess the status of the programme, and to plan for the future. In 2020 the focus was on the strategy refresh that will happen in 2020, and also on improving engagement with IMOS stakeholders This year RSSRG reported on the WA IMOS node activities and on the STAR task team work. Read more here |
March 2020 RSSRG's Thetis profiler has been redeployed off Rottnest island on 5th March 2020, as part of our IMOS satellite ocean colour sub-facility work. The Thetis, which is an instruments package named after a sea nymph in Greek mythology, allows studying the chemical, physical, optical and biogeochemical properties of waters off the West coast of Perth. It also provides field data in support to the validation of international satellite ocean colour missions (e.g., the European Space Agency Sentinel3/OLCI). Read more here |
March 2020 The IMOS community formed a task team who worked in 2018/19 on analysing IMOS data to assess state and trends of Australia's marine environments. The report is now published. RSSRG co-authored 2 chapters on the spatial and seasonal trends in chlorophyll-a and phytoplankton around Australia. Both chapters utilise data products from the NASA MODerate resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (Aqua-MODIS) satellite.The chapters of interest can be read and downloaded here and here Read more here Back to top of page |
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| Highlights from our IMOS-supported activities | ROSACE final presentation, EUMETSAT, 4th December |
JAXA Annual GCOM-C PI meeting, Tokyo, 20-23 January 2020 |
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| November 2019 RSSRG has published a number of reports on their IMOS-supported activities, including validation of satellite products, characterisation of optical properties of waters off Western Australia and some other cool stuff using radiative transfer simulations. These activities were carried out as follow-ups of the recommendation from the Radiometry Task Team work that we did in 2016-2017 Read more here |
December 2019 In his role of PI of the BOUSSOLE long-term time series project, D. Antoine led a study funded by the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT), with the aim of proposing a preliminary design for the future Copernicus System Vicarious Calibration (SVC) infrastructure, to be used for the Sentinel3 missions. The final meeting of the project was held on 4th December in Darmstadt, Germany Read more about ROSACE here |
January 2020 We delivered a presentation on the progress of our activities under JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) funding for the GCOM-C mission. The GCOM-C mission is among JAXA's flagships. It carries the Second-Generation Global ocean colour Imager (S-GLI) We deliver field data to JAXA, which they incorporate into the vicarious calibration of the sensor Read more on GCOM/S-GLI here Back to top of page |
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| RSSRG at the 2020 AMSA conference | CEOS Working Group Cal/Val in Perth | New RSSRG staff | ||||
| July 2019 RSSRG actively participated to the 2019 AMSA conference, Fremantle, through a number of presentations and posters and also through being part of the organising committee. Read more here |
July 2019 The calibration/validation Working Group (WGCV) of the International Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) had their 45th meeting in Perth. RSSRG (D. Antoine) reported on satellite ocean colour cal/val activities across the country, on behalf of the Australia's research community being active in this domain Read more here |
November 2019 Kadija Oubelkheir has joined RSSRG as a new Research Associate. Kadija will be responsible for our activities under the IMOS Satellite Ocean Colour sub-facility Read more here Back to top of page |
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| RSSRG get their feet wet! The 110E-line research voyage was carried out onboard R/V Investigator |
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| May-June 2019 On 14th May, RSSRG (D. Antoine, C. Robinson and M. Slivkoff) and 30 other scientists boarded the CSIRO research vessel Investigator in Fremantle and embarked on a voyage to the eastern Indian Ocean. There, the research teams spent a month gathering data on the area’s marine ecosystem, to determine its physical and biogeochemical changes and any connections to climate change. Antoine’s project is contributing to the Second International Indian Ocean Expedition (IIOE-2) – a comprehensive UNESCO science program that’s providing new information about the Indian Ocean’s currents, marine ecosystems and influence on climate. The IIOE-2 is a vital scientific endeavour, given that in the past 50 years the surface layers of the eastern Indian Ocean have warmed by more than a degree. Since it commenced in 2015, the program has enhanced our understanding about heat and mass transport in and around the Indian Ocean, which is vital for predicting climate variability and change. Read more here and here Back to top of page |
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