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Retreat of Alaska’s Columbia Glacier

Retreat of Alaska’s Columbia Glacier

Click here for more information. Image Credit: NASA

Our Mission

The Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society seeks to advance science and technology in geoscience, remote sensing and related fields using conferences, education, and other resources.

Fields of Interest

The fields of interest of the Society are the theory, concepts, and techniques of science and engineering as they apply to the remote sensing of the earth, oceans, atmosphere, and space, as well as the processing, interpretation and dissemination of this information.

  • Desert

    The advances of desertification is a menace to agriculture and urban settlements in many areas of the world. Urban areas, natural resources and crop monitoring and critical for our development and sustainability.

  • Desert

    Oceans cover 71 percent of the Earth's surface and contain 97 percent of the planet's water. Oceans contain the largest food and energy stocks, necessary for the development of an increasing population, and play an integral role in many of the Earth's systems including climate and weather.

  • Desert

    Katrina’s hurricane is a clear example of a devastating event due to an uncontrolled atmospheric event. Predicting hurricane trajectories helps save hundreds of lives and goods.

  • Desert

    The cryosphere contains an immense amount of solid water. During the past decades the amount of ice has been continuously decreasing, while the mean sea level has been slightly rising. Cryospheric monitoring provides the clues of the past of our planet, and may provide a clear indication of its future.

  • Desert

    Data gathered from a number of remote sensors must be processed before it is converted into usefull information. Classification techniques help in this process.

  • Desert

    Remote Sensors are all based on some sort of electromagnetic phenomena (scattering or emission). Understanding the propagation of the electromagnetic waves and their interaction with matter is critical to design new sensors and understand the measurements.

  • Desert

    Active and passive sensors, either in the microwave or in the visible and infrared parts of the spectrum are systematically used to gather data of a number of physical phenomena from ground, airplane and space.

  • Desert

    Information (mainly from remote sensors) for the benefit of society is the moto of the Global Earth Observation System of Systems.

Message From Our President

jon

The year 2012 is a milestone year for the Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (GRSS), the fiftieth anniversary of the GRSS, which started as the Group on Geoscience and Electronics (G-GE) in 1962 and evolved later into the society we know today. To celebrate the anniversary, the GRSS will publish a commemorative book which will appear in July. Many additional important activities are on the agenda of the GRSS in 2012, including our annual premier conference, IGARSS, which will be held in Munch, Germany July 22 through July 27. The Technical Program Committee (TPC) meeting for this year’s conference was held in Frascati, Italy on March 2. The task of the TPC this year was quite challenging because the volume of received abstracts received exceeded by far the number of abstracts received for prior conferences. The IGARSS 2012 team has done an excellent job in preparing for the conference.

The GRSS Administrative Committee (AdCom) meets three times a year; in the winter, in the summer (just prior to IGARSS) and in the fall. These meetings always run for two days, and the agenda is full of important reports, discussion items and new initiatives. The GRSS held its 2012 Winter AdCom meeting in Frascati on March 3-4. Among items discussed at the meeting I am happy to highlight that a Phase 1 proposal for a GRSS magazine has been approved by the IEEE Technical Activities Board (TAB) and a Phase 2 proposal is in preparation. The Phase 2 proposal will be submitted to TAB in a couple of months, and if successful, the GRSS magazine will be launched in January 2013. Another item of interest from the meeting is that the GRSS will offer its first Summer School in Munich, just prior to IGARSS 2012. Current information on the summer school is available at http://www.igarss2012.tum.de/. It will run for two to three days. Outstanding speakers have been selected to give lectures at the summer school. A third item I would like to mention from the AdCom meeting is that the GRSS will offer scholarships to Masters and Ph.D. students starting later this year. Please watch our website http://www.grss-ieee.org/ for updates.

The GRSS has recently started participating in two important IEEE activities. One such acitivity is the IEEE Women in Engineering (WIE) working group. Our representative is new AdCom member Gail Skoforonik Jackson. The other activity is the IEEE Life Sciences New Inititative (LSNI). Former IEEE Trans. on Geoscience and Remote Sensing (TGRS) Editor James A. Smith is the GRSS representative in LSNI. If you are interested in these two activities, please do not hesitate to be in touch with us.

I am very happy to announce that a paper which appeared in GRSS journal was selected as the 2012 recipient of the IEEE W.R.G. Baker Award. The IEEE W.R.G. Baker Award was established in 1956 and is presented by the IEEE Board of Directors for the most outstanding paper reporting original work published in any IEEE archival publication (such as Transactions, Journals and Letters), Magazines, or Proceedings. The paper must have been published during a three- to five-year window prior to the presentation year of the award on the fundamentals of electrical engineering, electronics, computing, and related arts and sciences as represented by IEEE. No more than one award may be given in any year. This year’s recipients are Gerhard Krieger, Alberto Moreira, Hauke Fielder, Irena Hajnsek, Marian Werner, Marwan Younis and Manfred Zink for their paper “TanDEM-X: A Satellite Formation for High-Resolution SAR Interferometry,” which appeared in IEEE TGRS, Vol. 45, Issue 11, Part 1, November 2007,  pp. 3317–3341. I congratulate all of the authors on this outstanding recognition.

Finally, I would like to congratulate the five new IEEE Fellows (Class of 2012) that were nominated through the GRSS: Jocelyn Chanussot, Steven Durden, John Mathews, Eric Miller and Simonetta Paloscia. In addition, two other GRSS members were elected to IEEE Fellow through nominations submitted by other IEEE societies: Malcolm Heron (Ocean Engineering Society) and Scott Tyo (Antennas and Propagation Society). Congratulations to all new IEEE Fellow members for this most distinguished recognition!

We are certainly looking forward to an exciting 50th Anniversary of our society and hope you will participate in our activities this year.

With my best wishes,

Jon Atli Benediktsson
President
IEEE GRSS
benedikt@hi.is

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