Robin's Blog

Archive for the ‘Academic’ Category

van Heuklon Ozone model implementation in Python

As part of my PhD I wanted to use a simple model which would give me an estimation of the atmospheric ozone amount given a location and time of year. A simple model to do this was created by van Heuklon in 1979, and was described in a delightfully simple paper (unfortunately not freely available […]

Review: Programming ArcGIS 10.1 with Python Cookbook

Summary: A useful guide to automating ArcGIS using Python, which is fully up-to-date with the latest version of ArcGIS. Definitely provides "quick answers to common problems", but it may take more effort to get a deep understanding of the methods used. Good breadth of coverage – but notably lacks raster examples – and well explained […]

John Snow’s Cholera data in more formats

In honour of the bicentenary of John Snow’s birth – and because I was asked to by someone via email – I have now released my digitisation of John Snow’s Cholera data in a few other formats: KML and as Google Fusion Tables. To save you reading my previous blog posts on the subject, I’ll […]

Resources for Sustainable Software and Reproducible Research in Remote Sensing presentation

I recently did a presentation entitled Sustainable Software and Reproducible Research in Remote Sensing at the Wavelength 2013 conference. The slides are available at SpeakerDeck, and shown below. https://speakerdeck.com/robintw/software-sustainability-and-reproducible-research-in-remote-sensing The rest of this page is a rather rough categorised list of various links and resources that may be useful to you after seeing the presentation (either […]

Converting latitude/longitude co-ordinates to Landsat WRS-2 paths/rows

Updated 6th Jan 2020: This post has been updated to fix the code example and the link to the Landsat shapefile download. As part of some work I was doing for my PhD, I needed to automatically find what Landsat scene path and row would contain a pixel with a certain latitude/longitude co-ordinate (this was […]

Can I atmospherically-correct my images with Py6S?

I’m a big fan of Matt Might’s blog, and thought I’d implement one of his tips for blogging as an academic – namely Reply to Public. I’ve had a number of emails from Py6S users asking me questions about how to atmospherically-correct entire satellite images with Py6S – so I thought ‘d respond online, so that […]

Py6S: Run a radiative transfer model with a user-defined input spectrum

Version 1.2 of Py6S has recently been released (including a couple of bug fix releases, taking the most recent version to v1.2.2), and the major new feature in this version is the ability to use any spectrum as the ground reflectance for a model run. Previously, users were restricted to using the built-in 6S ground […]

My first academic paper – on Py6S

Another exciting update for this new year: my first academic journal paper has been published! It’s called Py6S: A Python interface to the 6S Radiative Transfer Model, and is published in Computers and Geosciences. If you’re reading this from a university with a subscription to Computers and Geosciences then you can read it at ScienceDirect – […]

Major update to Free GIS Data site

The New Year is a time of new beginnings – and so it is rather appropriate to launch the complete redesign of my Free GIS Data list today.     As you can see from the screenshot above, it looks far nicer than before – but it is also far easier to navigate. The dropdown […]