Our human visual systems collect light from a pretty narrow slice of the electromagnetic spectrum. But there is so much more light to see. Radar systems use photons with much longer wavelengths that can break through clouds and smoke, and because the energy is sent from the sensor and bounces back, radar doesn’t need the illumination of the sun; it sees in the dark. These characteristics make it particularly useful for detecting wildfire burn extents. When we compare radar scenes from before and during (or after) an important change event like wildfire, the difference can jump out at us.
Here is how to use the Sentinel-1 Explorer to identify and measure an active wildfire event.
0:00 What is radar?
0:33 Finding a wildfire and choosing two dates
1:10 Masking only wildfire burn areas
1:32 Some other examples
To learn more about what the Sentinel-1 Explorer can do, check out this blog post from pixel-slinger extraordinaire, Robert Waterman. Here’s a link to the Sentinel-1 Explorer all set up with this Park Fire change detection.
Is the “old” version still available? We used to be able to change the values of profile variables for testing purposes. Now, it seems we are stuck with the one available feature, with only 3 fields (which can’t be changed) and the geometry. How are we supposed to test/evaluate if it is working correctly if we can no longer put in data values? As is, there isn’t even a way to test if the null/IsEmpty is working as expected, as there are no empty fields in the hard coded test feature. Would be nice to have this feature back so… Read more »
Hi Rhett, thanks for your feedback. You can easily bring in your own data values using any of the suggestions provided within the playground, such as “Feature from a portal item” or “FeatureSet from a portal item”. This will allow you to test your expression with your actual feature attributes, instead of updating a separate feature that is unrelated to your data.
If you want to manually add/update data values, you can also just create a dictionary/array of values and use that for testing as well. Check out the debugging guide page for more info. Hope this helps!
GetEnvironment is failing in field maps. Just crashes. Is this not support at all?
Hi Doug, the released version of Field Maps is still based on 100.15 of the Maps SDKs, so is using version 1.19 of Arcade (Arcade version matrix). We’ll have an update that is built on 200.x next year, which would include GetEnvironment. Hope this helps!