Space journalism: analyse the world using satellites with Google Earth Engine

This month we'll be learning about space journalism: how to analyse the world using satellites with Google Earth Engine.

Sensors on board satellites allow us to understand many things happening here on Earth, including deforestation, urban change, crop health, and conflict. While satellite imagery is well known, these sensors can also allow us to measure things which are otherwise invisible to the naked eye such as air temperatures and methane levels.

In this session we'll be learning how to produce true colour and 'false colour' images which highlight areas of interest or change which would not be visible otherwise. As well as being an analytical tool, these images can also be useful for visual storytelling.

We'll be following a tutorial that introduces us to Google Earth Engine, a free platform combining a catalog of satellite imagery and geospatial datasets with analysis and visualisation capabilities. It all runs in the cloud, which is helpful as this kind of data is often gigantic. We'll cover how to write code in Earth Engine, then how to pull in the satellite data we want, and how to visualise the information to identify changes and quantify differences on our planet.

All of our events are suitable for beginners, and no programming experience is required. Bring a laptop along as this a practical, hands-on workshop. Please also sign up for a Dropbox account if you don't already have one so you can edit the shared doc we'll be using during the event.

Schedule
7:00 🚪 Doors open
7:30 🗣 Show and tell
7:40 💻 Tutorial
9:00 🍺 Drinks at the George

If you can't make the main event, you're also welcome to just join us in the pub.

What is Journocoders? We are a community and monthly meetup for journalists and other people in the media who want to learn technical skills for use in their reporting -- and meet likeminded others.

Our events do often fill up, but if it's full please do join the waitlist as spaces do typically become available. And if you find you can no longer make it, please update your RSVP so someone else can take your spot.