Thursday, December 23, 2010

Scientists train software to keep track of climate change

Sify News via ANI: An international team of researchers say that a computer program, which automatically analyzes mounds of satellite images and other data, could help climate scientists keep track of complex, constantly changing environmental conditions.

The program uses probability to analyze and extract environmental information from satellite images and sensor data about ocean structures like wakes, upwellings and cold and warm eddies, according to the researchers.

Researchers first built a database of ocean structures and then used the knowledge of human experts to train the program to recognize and identify changes in the ocean. Researchers tested the technology on satellite images provided by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer of sections of oceans in the Iberian Atlantic, the Mediterranean coast and near the Canary Islands.

The tests included 1,000 cases of real ocean features, including 472 upwellings, 119 cloudy upwellings, 180 wakes, 10 anticyclonic eddies, 40 cyclonic eddies and 180 misclassified regions….

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