Ep.21: Predicting Sargassum landings using satellites with Marion Sutton
Our guest today is Marion Sutton, an oceanographer and project manager in the Environmental Applications Department of Collecte Localisation Satellites or CLS for short. She was in charge of developing new environmental products and services based on Earth Observation data for the oil & gas and maritime transportation industries. She is now in charge of several projects to valorise the use of Earth Observation marine data through diverse environmental monitoring and drift modelling applications. Collecte Localisation Satellites is subsidiary of the French Space Agency CNES and of CNP, a worldwide company and pioneer provider of monitoring and surveillance solutions for Earth since 1986. The company is a provider of ARGOS environmental data. Its mission is to deploy innovative space-based solutions to understand and protect our planet, and to manage its resources sustainably.
Listen to the episode to hear about:
- Introduction (0:00)
- Guest introduction (4:30)
- She has never seen Sargassum in real life (6:33)
- She sees Sargassum on satellite images (7:08)
- CLS started using Satellite data for Sargassum prediction in 2015 (10:13)
- SAMtool helping locals through Satellite detection of Sargassum and prediction of where it ends up in the next few days through drift models (12:28)
- SAMtool is designed for operational people who manage Sargassum removal on land but also used by Meteo France for their Sargassum predictions and CERMES to compare to their predictions (16:10)
- Geographic range of SAMtool spans across the entire wider Caribbean and West Africa (18:13)
- Until 2020 SAMtool was free and the users helped with feedback to develop this tool (19:48)
- They are looking for new ways to finance SAMtool: Institutions or governments could finance and make the system free for the user or ask a fee from the users to use the system (20:23)
- Between the first detection of Sargassum on Satellite images in 2015 and the SAMtool launch in 2019 they managed to adapt the Sargassum detection algorithm from 1000 m resolution images to 300 m resolution images (23:19)
- They use the MODIS aqua and Sentinel 2 & 3, LandSAT 8 satellite data to get daily information at 300 m resolution for the entire area and every 2-3 days information at 20 m resolution close to shore (26:08)
- High resolution satellites images (20m pixel) are available up to 300km from the shore (29:13)
- SAMtool was developed with a lot of imput from it’s end users (30:06)
- Improvements of SAMtool (33:27)
- Another development in progress is seasonal planning (36:33)
Learn more about the Marion Sutton and CLS:
֍ SAMtool Website
֍ Pilot 5.4 Sargassum detection for seasonal planning
֍ Space climate Observation France Honors list
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