GRSS Schools
IEEE GRSS provides multiple international/local schools for students and young professionals. Our goal is to provide specialized lectures and hands-on training to future experts in geoscience and remote sensing. This is a great opportunity for students to learn essential knowledge from basic to advanced from the world’s top researchers.
The Second Advanced Urban Remote Sensing Workshop
Organizers: GRSS Hong Kong Chapter
Venue: The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong
Dates: June 5-6
School on High-Performance and Disruptive Computing in Remote Sensing – ESI-TC / QUEST-TC
Venue: Santiago de Compostela, Spain
Dates: June 9-12
Quantum Technologies for Earth Observation (EO)-Enabled Precision Agriculture and Sustainable Food Systems – IEEE Kolkata Section
Venue: International Institute of Information Technology, Bhubaneswar, India
Dates: June 16-20
IEEE GRSS Summer School on UAS-Based GNSS-R Remote Sensing – GRSS SE Michigan Chapter
Venue: University of Michigan, U.S.
Dates: July 14-16
2026 IEEE GRSS Summer School on Modeling in Microwave and Optical Remote Sensing – MIRS TC
Venue: Beijing, China
Dates: July 23-25
IGARSS26 Summer School – IGARSS 2026 OC
Venue: George Mason University, USA
Dates: August 6-8
GRSS Latin America Soil Moisture School – Mexico City 2026 – GRSS Mexico Chapter
Venue: Mexico City, Mexico
Dates: August 31- September 2
Spatial Technologies and Remote Sensing -GRSS Algeria Chapter
Venue: University of Science and Technology Houari Boumedienne
Dates: (TBD)
ARISA 2026 – International School and Workshop on Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar Imaging, Systems, and Applications – GRSS South Italy Chapter
Venue: Napoli, Italy
Dates: September 1-2
IEEE GRSS IADF School on Computer Vision for Earth Observation – 5th edition – IADF TC
Venue: Benevento, Italy
Dates: September 8-11
IEEE GRSS School on Remote Sensing, GIS and SAR Image -GRSS Goa Student Branch Chapter
Venue: Don Bosco College of Engineering
Dates: September 24-26
GeoIntelligence for Sustainable Precision Agriculture – Karnataka Student Branch Chapter
Venue: NIE, Karnataka, India
Dates: October (TBD)
IEEE GRSS Advanced School on Satellite-Based Drought and Groundwater Stress Monitoring in Arid Regions – GRSS Tunisia Chapter
Venue: Gabes, Tunisia
Dates: October (TBD)
Microwave Radiometry School – IFT TC
Venue: Colorado State University, USA
Dates: October 6-9
Earth Observation and GeoAI for Climate-Resilient Cities – GRSS Austria Chapter
Venue: ITU Linz, Austria
Dates: October 14-16
Summer School On GeoAI and Intelligent Earth Systems for Climate Resilience – GRSS Joint Nigeria Chapter
Venue: University of Lagos, Nigeria
Dates: October 31-November 4
IEEE GRSS Winter School on Radar Meteorology 2026 (IG-WiSRM26) – Madhya Pradesh Section, GRSS IIT Indore Student Branch Chapter
Venue: Indian Institute of Technology Indore, Madhya Pradesh, India
Dates: February 2-6
Harnessing SAR and Machine Learning for Indian Agriculture
Organizers: GRSS, KLH Student Branch Chapter
Venue: KL University, Aziz Nagar Campus, Hyderabad India
Dates: February 24-27
AI Spring School: AI Foundations and Frontiers for the Future – GRSS Lahore Chapter
Venue: Lahore University of Management Sciences, Lahore, Pakistan
Dates: April 4-5
SAR and GNSS-R – GRSS NZ Contiguous Chapter
Venue: University of Canterbury, NZ
Dates: April 15-17
Geo-Resilience School – El Salvador 2026 – El Salvador Section, GRSS Student Chapter of Universidad de El Salvador
Venue: Universidad de El Salvador (UES)
Dates: May 14-16
Remote Sensing and Geospatial Intelligence for Sustainable Development in Karst Area – GRSS Guilin, Beijing Section
Venue: Guilin China
Dates: May 22-24
SAR-ACCESS 2026: Synthetic Aperture Radar Applications and Capacity-building Summer School – GRSS AESS Joint Philippine Chapter
Venue: Manila, Philippine
Dates: May 25-29
GeoAI for Urban Sensing Summer School –
Tunisia Chapter
Venue: Verdi Tunis Beach Resort in Gammarth, Tunis – Tunisia
Dates: May 2-4
School on High‐Performance and Disruptive Computing in Remote Sensing – ESI-TC
Venue: University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain
Dates: Jun 3-6
International Geolnformatics Summer School 2025 (IGSS 2025) – Wuhan Student Chapter
Venue: Wuhan University, Wuhan, China
Dates: July 2-8
Summer School on Remote Sensing Modeling and Retrievals on Earth Surface Properties – Beijing Chapter
Venue: Beijing, China
Dates: July 27-29
IGARSS 2025 Summer School – IGARSS
Venue: Brisbane, Australia
Dates: July 31-August 2
IEEE GRSS IADF School on Computer Vision for Earth Observation – 4th edition – IADF-TC
Venue: Benevento, Italy
Dates: September 9-12
International School on Advance SAR Polarimetry (PolSAR) for Agro-Environmental Applications – Quebec Chapter
Venue: Quebec City, Canada
Dates: September 22-25
ReACT summer school APSAR – REACT-TC
Venue: Matsue, Japan
Dates: October 4
8th Escuela de Primavera 2025 – ‘Artificial Intelligence and Quantum Computing in Earth Observation’ – Argentina Chapter
Venue: Cordoba, Argentina
Dates: October 6-10
MicrowAve MonItoring of WATer with Applications (MAMI WATA) – MIRS-TC
Venue: Rome, Italy
Dates: November 20-21
Workshop on Urban Heat Mapping: In-situ data collection and Analysis – REACT-TC
Venue: QUT Points campus, Brisbane, Australia
Dates: December 8-9
Disaster Management Applications
Venue: IIIT Kurnool, India
Dates: October 4-5
GRSS All Japan Chapter SAR tutorial
Venue: The University of Tokyo, Yamanaka-Ryo Naito Seminar House, Japan
Dates: September 19-20
URL: School Website
IEEE GRSS IADF School on Computer Vision for Earth Observation – 3rd edition
Venue: Benevento, Italy
Dates: September 11-13
URL: School Website
International School on SAR Polarimetry (PolSAR): From Theory to Applications
Venue: The University of Stirling, Scotland, UK
Dates: December 10-12
Microwave and Optical Remote Sensing Models Summer School
Venue: Beijing, China
Dates: August 19-21
IEEE GRSS IFT-MIRS TC Joint Summer School
Venue: California Institute of Technology, CA, USA
Dates: August 2024
2024 International Soil Moisture School – Europe
Venue: Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME), Budapest, Hungary
Dates: July 14-17, 2024
URL: School Website
International Geoinformatics Summer School 2024 (IGSS 2024)
Venue: East Lake Conference Hall / Star Lake Conference Hall, Wuhan, China
Dates: June 23-29
School on High-Performance and Disruptive Computing in Remote Sensing
Venue: University of Santiago de Compostela, Santiago de Compostela, Spain
Dates: June 4-7
Fourth series of “Artificial Intelligence in Remote Sensing Applications” in Velagapudi Ramakrishna Siddhartha Engineering College (VRSEC)
Goals and Objectives
The Primary Objectives of the course:
- To enable the Faculty of Technical Education to learn fundamentals of Remote Sensing and Image Analysis
- To understand various types of explainability methods such as: intrinsic versus post-hoc, model-specific versus model agnostic, and global versus local explanations
- To empower the participants with the explainable ML methods that should be applied in the field of Earth Observation.
- Exposure to case studies in Remote Sensing that signifies alignment amongst the challenges to analyze big and voluminous data.
- To provide the participants with experiential learning so as to write Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods for the emerging applications of Remote Sensing
Venue: Velagapudi Ramakrishna Siddhartha Engineering College (VRSEC), Vijayawada, A.P. India
Number of Audience: 130
Dates: Sep. 25 – 30, 2023
GRSS All Japan Chapter SAR Tutorial
Goals and Objectives
“SAR Tutorial” is an introductory tutorial of SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) technology, which covers a wide range of topics from the basics of SAR to applications and the latest research activities. The tutorial is mainly for students and graduate students who are interested in remote sensing. The main objective of the tutorial is to encourage students to join the field of remote sensing and to acquire new members of IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society.
Venue: The University of Tokyo, Yamanaka-Ryo Naito Seminar House, Yamanashi, Japan
Number of Audience: 30
Dates: September 14 – 15, 2023
IADF School on Computer Vision for Earth Observation
Goals and Objectives
Remote sensing techniques are utilized for a better understanding of the Earth and have impacted applications in weather forecasting, tracking biodiversity, land management, post-disaster relief, rescue management, and policymaking, to name a few. The amount of data acquired from sensors onboard Earth Observation (EO) satellites is increasing. For example, it is expected that Sentinel satellites will produce ten terabytes of EO data once fully operational. The availability of data from multiple sensors and satellites provides an opportunity to develop innovative methodologies for remote sensing applications.
As the IEEE GRSS IADF, after the success of the first school on Computer Vision for Earth Observation (CV4EO), we are pleased to announce its second edition open to everybody who has a strong motivation and interest in the topics addressed by it. This school will focus on applying CV methods to address challenges in remote sensing.
This school will focus on applying CV methods to address challenges in remote sensing. This school will contain a series of lectures on the existing methods utilized for analyzing satellite images, along with the challenges encountered. Each lecture will be followed by a practical session where the participants will go deep into the details of the techniques discussed in the lecture using some commonly used programming languages (e.g., Python) and open-source software tools. The material related to both lectures and practical sessions will be released to the audience. We plan to cover the following remote sensing topics in the school depending on the availability of suitable teachers (see below):
- Machine Learning in Remote Sensing
- Explainable AI for Earth Science
- Big Geo-Data
- Multi-source Image Analysis
- Dimensionality Reduction, Hyperspectral Feature Analysis
- SAR Image Analysis
- Hyperspectral Image Analysis
Venue: University of Sannio, Benevento, Italy
Number of Audience: 30
Dates: Sep. 13 – 15, 2023
Summer School on Modeling in Remote Sensing
Education Initiative, MIRS TC, and GRSS/Beijing Chapter propose to organize a workshop on theory and techniques for forward modeling in remote sensing, with an emphasis on models for the earth’s surface (land and ocean). The workshop will bring together members of the MIRS TC and the broader scientific community to advance the state of the art in modeling remote sensing observations. This workshop has been held annually since 2016 and made significant impacts in Remote Sensing community. The workshop will take the form of either in-person or hybrid depending on the future situation. Funds would be used to support the traveling of 4-5 keynote speakers and students.
Venue: NSSC at Zhongguancun, Beijing, China / Hybrid
Number of Audience: 290 (90 in-person / 200 online)
Dates: Aug. 22-24, 2023
IGARSS 2023 Summer School
Goals and Objectives
IGARSS 2023 organizing committee and IEEE University of Southern California GRSS/APS/SSCS joint student branch chapter propose to organize a summer school on topics including synthetic aperture radar, geospatial analysis, space-based environmental monitoring, and their broad applications in geosciences and remote sensing. The summer school will bring together IGARSS 2023 student attendees, GRSS student members and the broader research community and serve as a catalyst for educating the next generation of GRSS scientists and engineers, inspiring collaborations on these research themes, and increasing the visibility and membership of GRSS. The workshop will be held on the campus of University of Southern California, as co-sponsored by the USC Ming Hsieh Institute. This summer school is in conjunction with the IGARSS 2023 events. Funds will be used to support the traveling, lodging, and catering of 4-5 instructors and students.
Venue: University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Number of Audience: 70
Dates: July 13 – 15, 2023
Summer School on High-Performance and Disruptive Computing in Remote Sensing (HDCRS)
Goals and Objectives
The chairs of HDCRS plan to organize a summer school every year on specific subjects that are included in the research topics addressed by the WG: (1) Supercomputing and Distributed Computing, (2) Specialized Hardware Computing and (3) Quantum Computing. The overall objective of the school is to establish a venue to network with students and young professionals, as well as senior researchers and professors who are world-renowned leaders in the field of Remote Sensing (RS) and work on interdisciplinary research with High Performance Computing (HPC), cloud computing, quantum computing and parallel programming models with specialized hardware technologies. The organization of this school is in line with the main objectives of the HDCRS WG, that is to connect a community of interdisciplinary researchers in RS who use high-performance computing technologies to address RS applications.
Venue: University of Iceland, Reykjavik, Iceland
Number of Audience: 30
Dates: May 29 – June 1, 2023
Digital Agricultural Technologies (DATs): Pathway to Prosperity
Goals and Objectives
The prime objective of this Summer school is to provide a forum for participants to network, foster innovations, exchange of ideas, explore job opportunities and community connect. The 4-day summer school on “Digital Agricultural Technologies: Pathway to Prosperity” is organized on Mar. 27-30, 2023 for the benefit of beginners in this field with an objective of creating knowledge on the latest advancement in Digital Agrisciences. It also helps teaching faculties and research scholars to understand how well they can apply club RS and emerging technologies in their research.
The following objectives are envisaged:
- Provide basic insights in to fundamentals of Digital Agrisciences
- Provide hands on training to reinforce the theoretical concepts
- Provide a platform to interact with eminent subject matter experts and discuss their ideas.
- Provide directions to budding researchers in publishing research articles
- Discuss funding opportunities or fellowships to continue their research
- Gain awareness of the forward-looking technologies and their scope in agriculture – artificial intelligence, remote sensing, crowdsourcing, and big data analytics to bring ease in the society.
- Understand how to empower smallholder farmers through ICT/Digital Tools in market access.
- To disseminate the area of Remote sensing for research and increase membership of GRSS by 15-17%.
Venue: Hyatt Hyderabad Gachibowli, India / Hybrid
Number of Audience: 280 (110 in-person / 170 online)
Dates: Mar. 27-30, 2023
International Soil Moisture School 2023
Goals and Objectives
Soil moisture is an important land surface variable responsible for partitioning precipitation into evapotranspiration, runoff, etc. It is critical in linking the terrestrial water, energy, and carbon cycles. Microwave remote sensing provides means to estimate soil moisture at global scales. The importance of soil moisture led to the launch of dedicated satellite sensors Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) and Soil Moisture Ocean Salinity (SMOS). In addition, active microwave sensors such as Sentinel, RADARSAT, PALSAR, and ASCAT, among others, have been used for soil moisture estimation. NASA ISRO SAR (NISAR), an upcoming satellite mission, also shall be used for producing soil moisture. Recently, the potential of spaceborne GNSS reflectometry has been explored for retrieving soil moisture.
Typically, L-band frequency is used for soil moisture estimation because of its strong penetration through vegetation and sensitivity to surface soil moisture conditions. Recently, the potential of P-band frequency has been explored, given its ability to retrieve soil moisture from the deeper layers. Global scale efforts led to the establishment of the International Soil Moisture Network (ISMN), which is intended to provide in-situ soil moisture observations to validate satellite soil moisture products. Satellite soil moisture retrievals are used actively to assess the global water cycle and land-atmosphere feedbacks, estimate precipitation, manage irrigation water, and monitor droughts, heatwaves, and floods.
Retrieving soil moisture from low-frequency microwave sensors requires a retrieval algorithm, which typically relies on physics-based schemes that relate soil dielectric constant with satellite observations. The soil dielectric constant is, in turn, sensitive to soil moisture variations. Active research efforts are being made to develop novel retrieval algorithms to estimate soil moisture with high accuracy and resolution. The research in this domain is also being pursued in India. The proposed “International Soil Moisture School” in India aims to introduce the concepts of microwave remote sensing and soil moisture retrieval algorithms and provide a holistic overview of soil moisture’s role in the global water cycle to young postgraduates and Ph.D. students of India. The school will also provide a platform for interactions between researchers working in this domain and resource persons. This event will result in establishing connections for potential collaborations in the future. Besides, we envision introducing researchers to GRSS activities and making them part of the growing GRSS community through this school.
The Soil Moisture School (SMS) aims to engage students and young professionals by providing necessary information to thoroughly explore the data from existing and future microwave soil moisture missions for science investigation and societal applications.
Venue: Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India
Number of Audience: 80
Dates: Mar. 15 – 17, 2023.
IEEE GRSS Instrumentation and Future Technologies Remote Sensing Summer School (IFT-R3S)
Goals and Objectives
The objective of the first Summer School on Instrumentation and Future Technologies for Remote Sensing (IFT-R3S) is to promote future research in remote sensing, connect Master students, junior Ph.D. students, recent graduates and young professionals, with research groups linked to the IFT Technical Committee, and to highlight the educational activities of GRSS. Hosted at the University of Auckland, the planned workshop will be co-organized by the IEEE Instrumentation and Future Technologies Technical Committee (IFT). Using the success of the pilot summer school held in Spain in 2019 as a template, the 2023 New Zealand Summer school will enlist foremost experts to teach the curriculum with a topic list including sensor and mission design, theory and state-of-the-art in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), bistatic radar and signals of opportunity, and passive spectral remote sensing.
Venue: University of Auckland, New Zealand
Number of Audience: 40
Dates: Jan. 30 – Feb. 3, 2023
Computer Vision for Earth Observation
Goals and objectives: CV methods to address challenges in remote sensing
Venue: Online
Number of audience: 375
Dates: October 3-7
Artificial intelligence and data assimilation for sustainable development
Goals and objectives:
- Introduce students to the concepts of data assimilation and artificial intelligence multisensor analysis.
- Hands-on sessions for practical activities on graph-based data analysis and data assimilation in real-life scenarios
Venue: UC Berkeley, CA
Number of audience: In-person (10 participants) + Online (7 participants)
Dates: August 15 – 19
Summer School of Modeling in Remote Sensing
Goals and objectives:
- Theory and techniques for forward modeling in remote sensing, with an emphasis on models for the earth’s surface (land and ocean)
- Optical radiative transfer models for land, atmosphere, and ocean
- Microwave radiative transfer models for land, atmosphere, and ocean
- Remote sensing algorithms of land, atmosphere and ocean parameters
Venue: Online
Number of audience: 355
Dates: July 18 – 20
Drone-based Hyperspectral Imaging
Goals and objectives:
- Drone-based remote sensing to the participants and will include practical training where data collection campaign, technical lessons, demo by drone service providers and hands-on exercises.
Venue: UTAR, Kampar, Perak Malaysia
Number of audience: 20
Dates: July 14 – 16
Advanced Urban Remote Sensing Workshop
Goals and objectives:
- State of the art of the urban remote sensing methods, applications, and its implication for sustainable development
- 5-day workshop and 0.5-day field trip in Hong Kong
- Combine the urban remote sensing theory and immersive field experience in the high and intensive urbanization areas
Venue: The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong
Number of audience: In-person (90 participants) + Online (50 participants)
Dates: July 8 – 9
International Soil Moisture School
Goals and objectives:
- Engage young professionals (inc. students) by providing necessary information for them to fully explore the data from existing and future microwave soil moisture missions for science analysis and societal applications.
- In situ measurement techniques, soil moisture retrieval algorithms hands-on sessions
Venue: University of Massachusetts and Harvard Forests, Massachusetts
Number of audience: 30
Dates: July 6 – 7
Summer School on High-Performance and Disruptive Computing in Remote Sensing
Goals and objectives:
- Supercomputing and Distributed Computing
- Specialized Hardware Computing;
- Quantum Computing
Venue: University of Iceland, part of the GRSS Earth Science Informatics (ESI) Technical Committee
Number of audience: Hybrid – 30 attendees on site
Dates: May 29 – June 2
Fall School on “Advanced Techniques in Remote Sensing Data Processing and Analysis”
Goals and objectives: The research and development community has been engaged in advancements in the processing and analyzing remotely sensed data in the last couple of decades. The school will introduce the students to numerous approaches/frameworks/schemes/algorithms to address information retrieval in remotely sensed satellite data acquisition, processing, and analysis. They include feature extraction (information retrieval), information analysis/characterization, information reasoning, spatio-temporal modeling, and visualization. With data availability across various spatial/spectral/temporal resolutions, besides information extraction, the school will focus on pattern retrieval, pattern analysis, spatial reasoning, simulation, and modeling of spatio-temporal behaviours of several terrestrial phenomena and processes as well.
Format: Hybrid
Tentative audience: 300
Tentative dates: Nov. 25-27, 2021
PhD Spring School on “Advanced remote sensing techniques for risk management”
Goals and objectives: The PhD school on “Advanced remote sensing techniques for risk management” aim at introducing the attendees to the development and implementation of new, innovative and advanced remote sensing techniques to improve capabilities in characterizing risk components such as hazard, vulnerability and exposure by means of hyperspectral image analysis, advanced SAR processing, machine learning and cloud computing for remote sensing, and geostationary satellites data processing. The PhD school will be supported by EU H2020 EOXPOSURE. It will consist of three days of theoretical and practices sessions focused on tools and application examples, and two days of EOEXPOSURE open workshop to present conferences and tutorials related to risk, vulnerability and exposure applications. To this aim, the school and the EOXPOSURE event will bring together leading researchers from academic institutions, data providers and industry end users.
Format: online
Tentative audience: 300
Tentative dates: end of September 2021 – week 38
IGARSS21 summer school on “Drone acquisition, processing and applications”
Goals and objectives: The summer school aims to offer the students a thorough introduction to the use of drones for remote sensing, with a strong focus to operational use of these platforms for several applications. It includes diverse sessions:
- Theory: platforms, sensors and imaging data, ground truth measurements;
- Hands-on sessions: data acquisition, data processing, validation of materials;
- Demos: drone& camera set-up; mission planning, calibration, quality control; ground truth;
Format: in person
Tentative audience: 20
Tentative dates: July 7-9, 2021
Summer School on High-Performance and Disruptive Computing in Remote Sensing (HDCRS)
Goals and objectives: The summer school organized by the High-Performance and Disruptive Computing in Remote Sensing (HDCRS) Working Group is part of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (GRSS), in particular of the Earth Science Informatics (ESI) Technical Committee. This school is the perfect venue to network with students and young professionals, as well as senior researcher and professors who are world-renowned leaders in the field of remote sensing and work on interdisciplinary research with high-performance and distributed computing, disruptive computing and parallel programming models with specialized hardware. This year the programme includes:
- Topic 1: From HPC to Quantum paradigms in Earth Observation
- Topic 2: Programming GPUs and Accelerators with Directives
- Topic 3: Scaling Machine Learning for Remote Sensing using Cloud Computing
For more information, see indico-jsc.fz-juelich.de/event/174/overview
Format: online
Tentative audience: 300
Tentative dates: May 31 – June 3, 2021