Anastasia Sarelli, a researcher from Cloudeo Hellas was seconded for 3 months to Lund University, hosted by Prof. Marko Scholze in spring 2024. During her secondment she was mainly focusing on UC 2: Temperature anomalies and particularly the UC design conducting broad literature review evaluating best practices and related approaches as well as processing data layers and setting up the development environment of the EO-PERSIST platform.
Kleanthis Karamvasis, a postdoctoral researcher from NTUA and leader of work package 4: Scientific Advances for Permafrost Monitoring of the EO-PERSIST project, was seconded to the Finnish Meteorological Institute (Helsinki, Finland) for July and August 2023, hosted by Juha Lemmetyinen. He collaborated primarily with Ioanna Merkouriadi on exploiting low-frequency SAR observations for monitoring permafrost active layer dynamics and snow modeling. Additionally, he worked with Jorge Ruiz and other members of Juha’s group (the Earth Observation Research Group) on monitoring the active layer freeze-thaw cycle using land deformation derived from interferometric SAR observations.
GIS Analyst and CEO Giuseppe Di Caprio from PLANETGIS SKY SRL has been on secondment for two months from 13/07/2023 to 11/08/2023 and from 22/01/2024 to 21/02/2024 to Harokopio University in Athens in the frame of the EO-PERSIST project (WP2 Task 2.2, Task 2.4; WP3 Task 3.3, Task 3.4), hosted by Prof. George Petropoulos. The main objectives during the secondments have been the definition of the system requirements and KPIs specification, and the study of land degradation due to permafrost thawing, thermal anomalies, and coastal changes and their interactions.
Vassilis Andronis, a researcher from NTUA for the EO-PERSIST project, has been seconded to CloudFerro in Warsaw, Poland, starting May 16, 2024, for a duration of four months (June, July, August, September). His secondment is currently ongoing. In the initial stages, he is collaborating mainly with Mrs. Natalia Górska and Mr. Patryk Grzybowski.
With Mrs. Natalia Górska, he aims to understand the activities of CloudFerro and familiarize himself with the projects they implement, particularly the company’s involvement in the EO- PERSIST project. Meanwhile, with Mr. Patryk Grzybowski, he is gaining insights into open-source cloud computing infrastructures and operations for processing, exploiting, and storing large volumes of data (Big Data) through both graphical user interfaces (GUI) and command-line interfaces (CLI).
Vassilis is also continuing his work on the EO- PERSIST geographic data and services inventory, as well as the collection of open data repositories. Additionally, it tries to optimize algorithmic approaches in the field of permafrost.
Mirela Vasile from University of Bucharest (UB) was on secondment for 1 month to Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI) in Helsinki, and the Scientific Research Station within the Arctic Space Center in Sodankyla, Lapland Finland, hosted by Dr. Juha Lemmetyinen, as part of the EO-PERSIST HORIZON TMA MSCA Staff Exchanges project (A cloud-based remote sensing data system for promoting research and socioeconomic studies in arctic environments).
She was involved in producing a spatial data collection of areas with possible thermokarst induced by permafrost thawing in the arctic area of Northern Europe, which required field recognition of landforms, data sources selection and mapping. These data are being used in WP3: Socioeconomic impacts assessment related to thawing permafrost of EO-PERSIST HORIZON TMA MSCA Staff Exchanges project, working on Task 3.1: Land Degradation, specifically, to train the selected U-net deep-learning algorithm for automatic identification of themokarst features, which will be followed by validation including further mapping.
Răzvan Popescu
“I was in my first EO-PERSIST secondment in Athens, Greece, in the period 5 August – 4 September 2023. I visited the CLOUDEO Hellas partner and I worked on WP3 (Socioeconomic impacts assessment related to thawing permafrost), task 3.1 (Land Degradation) and task 3.2 (Temperature anomalies) of the project.
My research focus was related to documentation of the permafrost modelling methodologies reported in the scientific literature, both on latitudinal and mountain permafrost and to thermal anomalies in Svalbard. For temperature anomalies study, I used ERA5 temperature data available from https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu. Climade Data Store (CDS) is freely available and can be used to explore climate data. The data were downloaded as .nc file (multidimensional raster) and processed in the ArcGIS Pro software where temperature trends and anomalies were investigated. Thermal trends indicated that from the 60s the temperature increased continuously with about 3-5 °C being more accentuated in the colder regions. That is equivalent to almost 1°C/decade which is much larger than the global average warming trend of 0.18°C/decade since 1981 as indicated by NOAA.
New skills that I acquired are related to working with ArcGIS Pro software, multidimensional rasters (netcdf format) and temperature anomaly analysis. Also, I got familiarized with Copernicus web portal and ERA5 temperature data format and characteristics.
Working in a new environment and getting in contact with specialists from other areas than geography was really fruitful. This stage helped me to explore new research possibilities and prepare future research projects collaborations with colleagues from various disciplines and to get familiarized with new spatial analysis technologies and integrate them into my research and teaching activities.”
Maria Kremezi and Pelagia Koutsantoni, two PhD candidates from the National Technical University of Athens, completed their two-month secondment to CloudFerro S.A. in Warsaw, Poland, from March to April 2024. Hosted by Stanisław Dałek, CTO, this secondment was part of the EO-PERSIST project. Maria’s research focuses on coastline mapping and monitoring (WP3), while Pelagia’s research focuses on mitigation methods for ionospheric phase delay on InSAR (WP4). They primarily collaborated with Artur Bargiel and Patryk Grzybowski to utilize the CREODIAS platform for their research.
Maria Kremezi and Pelagia Koutsantoni, two PhD candidates from the National Technical University of Athens, are currently on their two-month secondment to the Finnish Meteorological Institute in Helsinki, Finland, from May to June 2024, hosted by Juha Lemmetyinen in the framework of the EO-PERSIST project. They primarily collaborated with Jorge Ruiz and other members of Juha’s group (the Earth Observation Research Group) to continue their research activities from previous secondments and share knowledge on their areas of expertise. Maria is working on exploiting Sentinel-2 super-resolution methodologies for sub-pixel coastline mapping and monitoring (WP3) and Pelagia on researching the effects of ionospheric delay in SAR interferometry and specifically how the inferred ionospheric phase can correlate with GPS ground measurements (WP4).
Post-doctoral Researcher Nikolina Myofa from Harokopio University was on secondment for 15 days at the University of Lund, hosted by Marko Scholze.
The WP assigned to my secondment is the WP 3, Socioeconomic impacts assessment related to thawing permafrost. During my secondment at the University of Lund I had regular meetings with the socioeconomic team about the development of the database at NUTS II level that will be used for the analysis of the socio-economic impact related to thawing permafrost.
Research team member Polyxeni Toumasi from Harokopio University of Athens is completing her 1st month secondment (out of 2), to YETITMOVES in Pavia (Italy), hosted by Mr. Massimiliano Chersich.
Αs part of the project a presentation was held where the progress of the work so far regarding WP3 was discussed.
