On December 5-7, I went to the satellite-based remote sensing training at Yangon Technological University (YTU). The training course is for 3 days and is organised by FutureWater, VanderSat and HKV companies, organized in partnership with TU Delft and within the “Leapfrogging Delta Management in Myanmar” program.
So that’s interesting. Besides, in this training course, they gave lectures how to work with satellite data using Google Earth Engine (GEE) and more about river morphology, rainfall and soil moisture. This makes it easier to understand the processes behind rainfall, river morphology and soil moisture.
On the first day of training course, they started to collect expectations from the students for examples, what would you like to learn from this training course, how often you use Google Earth Engine at your work and etc. Afterwards, there were parallel sessions – one for rainfall and another one for river morphology.
I chose to attend the rainfall session as I am personally interested in climate change and climatology to contribute more about climate science in Myanmar. Besides, this is the first time for me to learn the process in climate change using Satellite data.
Firstly, I learned how to use using Google Earth Engine and then later on, use the rainfall Myanmar application. You can collect sum, mean, minimum and maximum rainfall data by adding the period that you prefer to check. That’s easy.
Would you like to check your hometown rainfall data? No problem, you don’t need to have specific knowledge. All you need to do is choose the region or maybe specific area. If you know longitude and latitude of your place, that can collect the data too.
Would you like to generate your data using graphs or put into the excel sheet? You can generate it easily. If you choose the ‘overlay’ tab, you can add the lay onto the map of Myanmar by indicating the amount of precipitation in that chosen region.
Wow that sounds nice, right?! You can try to use that, no need to log in and membership.
RainMyanmar allows you to intercomparing five satellite-derived rainfall products to evaluate their performance, but also to do comparisons between spatial and temporal rainfall and drought patterns in different states, districts and river basins. RainMyanmar will remain freely accessible and is particularly intended for development, research, and educational purposes.
My own fascination about the weather
Weather fascinates people. We mostly complain about the weather: too cold, too hot, too wet, maybe that might be the reason that we talk about it every day. We do not recognize the weather when there is a sunny and comfortable day to do outdoor activities.We get disappointed if we encounter the unexpected forecast, especially if the forecast was sunny but precipitation falls from the sky.
This training changed my knowledge and perception of using Apps for rainfall and it is important to have better to understand in working with state-of-the-art tools, particularly Google Earth Engine.
