The purpose of this trip was to attend and present a paper at the IEEE’s 2003 International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS ‘03). IGARSS’03 was held in Toulouse, France from July 21-25. IGARSS’03 was a large conference, with more than 1500 participants and a full program of paper presentations, interactive poster presentations, and technical exhibitions over 5 days. The presentations covered a wide range of remote sensing areas with up to 20 sessions running in parallel at any one time. My interest was mainly in the Hyperspectral sessions. I also attended many papers in the vegetation and agriculture applications sessions. I presented a paper titled “Time Series Analysis of EO-1 Hyperion Data for Yield Estimation at an Agricultural Site” in the Hyperspectral Applications session. I also presented a paper on behalf of Fred Prata titled “The Global Land Surface Temperature Product from ENVISAT’S AATSR: Description, Validation and Application” in the ENVISAT/MERIS-AATSR session. Both presentations went well.

The symposium was well organized and the papers were of high quality. With the wide range of topics available and many sessions running in parallel, everyone had a good choice of papers to attend throughout the week. The poster sessions were of high standard and there were a large number of poster presentations each day.

While at the conference, I also took the opportunity to hold discussions with Dr Jay Pearlman from the Boeing Company, USA on ongoing and future collaborations with our CSIRO EOC/CLW group. During the discussions I updated Dr Pearlman on progress with the Coleambally Time Series Research and discussed the beginning of agricultural applications work from the dataset. We also discussed possibilities for future collaboration, such as the possibility of using the Time Series Dataset for simulation studies with upcoming satellite sensors. Dr Pearlman was impressed and encouraged with work so far and is keen to remain involved with our group. Dr Pearlman will be coming to Australia before the end of 2003 for another meeting with our group in Canberra.

On my return leg of the journey I went on to the University of Southern Queensland in Toowoomba for a meeting with Dr Sunil Bhaskaran. This meeting was about possible collaborative work on use of Hyperspectral data for urban applications such as identification of roof materials. The possibility of running the EOC Hyperion workshop at USQ was also discussed and Dr Bhaskaran will be seeking expressions of interest from organizations/individuals in the QLD area interested in such a workshop. Dr Bhaskaran will be coming to Sydney in December 2003 for some further meetings with me and to do some lab and fieldwork.

In summary, I found the IGARSS meeting very useful to my area of work. In particular, I found the large number of Hyperspectral sessions as well as numerous hyperspectral papers in other sessions very informative and a good update on the latest developments in technology, methods and processing as well as developments in application areas. I would recommend this conference to anyone with an interest in remote sensing.

I have a copy of the IGARSS’03 proceedings on CD and would be happy to provide a copy to anyone interested in it.

Next year’s IGARSS would be held in Anchorage, Alaska from September 20 to 24, 2004. Watch the website http://www.igarss04.org/ for further info. The online system for abstract submissions will begin on January 1, 2004.

Acknowledgements

David Jupp kindly donated his frequent flyer points for airfares and the remaining costs were funded by the EOC Hyperspectral project.