Our special edition of the Sentinel Hub Custom Script Contest - Climate Change - focusing on demonstrating effective change detection related to climate change has ended on 11th September 2022. See details below and the results here!
Remote sensing is making its way into more and more applications and fields. Tools like the Sentinel Hub EO Browser with its custom scripting allow all people to browse, analyse and visualise satellite data in almost real-time.
Together with our partners, the Euro Data Cube (EDC), the Copernicus EU Earth Observation programme, the European Space Agency, and the World Meteorological Organization we are looking for new and innovative ideas and scripts. Therefore, we have organised a series of the Sentinel Hub Custom Script Contests starting with the first one in Spring 2019 and following with the second one in Winter 2019/2020. In April and May 2020 we organised a special edition of the Contest - the Covid-19 Custom Script Contest. Its aim was to help the world facing huge challenges getting back to ’normal’ after the coronavirus Covid-19 pandemic. The success of the series motivated us to continue with the third edition of the Contest in Summer 2020. The last special edition of the contest - Urban Growth in Africa - was organized in May 2021. To learn more about the results of our previous contests, visit the Past Sentinel Hub Custom Script Contests page.
This special edition of the Sentinel Hub Custom Script Contest was organized in partnership with the World Meteorological Organization. The contest started on 15th March 2022 and ended at midnight on 11th September 2022. The objective of this activity was to demonstrate the power of EO data in helping detect the effects of climate change. See the results of the contest here. All submitted scripts will be added to our custom script repository in coming days. We will highlight the submitted stories in the Sentinel Hub blog.
We wanted the Contest to be completely open. Therefore, all submitted scripts competed under a common category, regardless of which data collection (Sentinels, Landsat, commercial data, etc.) the scripts use. We were particularly interested in scripts demonstrating efficient change detection related to climate change.
If you didn’t have the skills to create a script, you could participate with a written Story! You could use EO data to write a matching story focusing on how to communicate climate change via EO data.
Available material on how to get started with custom scripting for the EO Browser:
For the best custom scripts:
In addition to the above, we will award the best custom script by a high school student or high-school team with a box of goodies. We specially wanted to encourage the beginners and students to give it a try and submit their scripts.
All winners will also get an opportunity to highlight their winning scripts in the Sentinel Hub blog, advertised by Sentinel Hub and ESA.
For the best written stories How to best communicate climate change via EO data:
In addition to the above, we will award the best written story by a high school student or high-school team with a box of goodies.
The stories will be judged differently. We wanted to see you use EO data available in the EO Browser, but the priority was the story itself. In this case, writing a new custom script was not necessary, you could also use integrated visualisations as well as already existing scripts.
Our contest partner, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), is offering an internship to a participant of their choice. The internship offered will last six months and will take place in Geneva at WMO headquarters. A selected candidate will have the opportunity to learn more about WMO activities, in particular the WMO Space Programme.
Details of the WMO internship offer:
The Contest was open worldwide.
In addition to the general description of the script, the following information was required:
By participating in the Contest, the participants confirmed that they have read and agreed with the Terms and Conditions of the Sentinel Hub Custom Script Contest as well as with the Sentinel Hub’s Terms of Service.
We were especially interested in the scripts covering one of the following:
Please note that if your script was a really cool one and does not meet the above guidelines, we will still consider your script and evaluate it under the same conditions as the rest.
Adam Voiland has been a science writer for NASA Earth Observatory since 2012. He covers a range of topics, though natural disasters, weather, climate change, human impacts, hydrology, wildfires, and volcanology are particular interests. In addition to reporting and editing Image of the Days and long-form feature stories, Voiland plays an active role in maintaining the Earth Matters blog and social media @NASAEarth.
Head of Remote Sensing and GIS at 4M-Analytics, a sub-surface utility mapping company. His skills are satellite and aerial imagery interpretation and analysis, as well as long-term surface trends, landcover and landcover change delineation, and a general interest in anything that can be observed from above, natural or man made.
Hayley Evers-King is a marine EO scientist with a focus on Sentinel-3 and ocean colour. Hayley has worked on a wide variety of topics including water quality, ocean heat flux, and carbon pools. She is passionate about growing the use of EO data and currently supports EUMETSAT on user support and training activities for their Copernicus missions. She believes science communication is part of every scientists job and has been involved in many activities promoting EO science, from the creation of ocean MOOCs, youtube videos, and open source python tutorials, to music compositions, poetry evenings, and cooking demonstrations.
Heikki Pohjola is working as Scientific Officer at WMO Space Programme. Before his career at WMO he worked at EUMETSAT as a Remote Sensing Scientist for Meteosat Third Generation (MTG) satellite mission and especially on its Lightning Imager (LI) instrument development. Before EUMETSAT he worked for a decade in the field of weather radars and lightning detection systems in private sector at Vaisala. He holds MSc in Meteorology from the University of Helsinki, where he started his career working at Finnish Meteorological Institute as a research scientist in the field of remote sensing.
Joshua Stevens is the lead visualizer and cartographer of the NASA Earth Observatory. He has researched and taught cartographic design, geovisual analytics, and remote sensing for more than a decade. Prior to working with NASA, Joshua was an NSF IGERT Fellow in big data social science at The Pennsylvania State University, where he pursued a Ph.D. in geography. His work has been featured by a variety of media, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Geographic, and the Discovery Channel.
Maxim acquired a PhD in geosciences from Royal Holloway University of London/National Physical Laboratory, United Kingdom. He has four years of postdoctoral experience. He is an expert in remote sensing with optical data and has been working as a product manager at Sentinel Hub GmbH since 2020.
Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder of Sinergise
A longtime journalist and editor for Euronews. Since 2018, he has been working with EO sources to illustrate and identify the impact of climate change on our planet. He recently joined ECMWF as Content and Science Writer for the Copernicus ECMWF services and Destination Earth. In particular, he reported on the exceptional wildfire seasons in the Arctic or Amazonia, the Greenland melt, or the 2020 ozone hole in the Northern Hemisphere.
Sophie Hebden is a research coordinator on Earth observations for Future Earth, and is liaison to the European Space Agency, based at ESA's Climate Office in Harwell, Oxfordshire. Her work spans Earth observation for climate science and communication, and she is passionate about making research findings accessible through animations, blogs, syntheses and briefings, infographics, web apps and more. Before joining Future Earth in 2019 she worked in the UK's National Centre for Earth Observation and as a freelance science writer and editor with articles and podcasts featured in the New Scientist magazine and the Foundational Questions Institute.
When and how will I be informed about results?
Can I base the script on a publicly available research paper?
Do I need to subscribe to Sentinel Hub to participate in the Contest?
My script stops working after it becomes too long.
I am more interested in sharing knowledge than a monetary prize. Should I still participate?
Can I submit scripts that just look nice?
If I do not win the prize, will my script still be added to the Custom Script repository?
I have submitted a script but now I want to correct it. What should I do?
Where can I get more information?
See also Terms and Conditions of the Sentinel Hub Custom Script Contest for more details.