Our project
In the past months, our class carried out a project organized by E.S.A. about climate change. We did experiments, visited sites that helped us in the research of data such as EO Browser and went on a field trip to Lake Albano to analyze what the problem was about.
On this page you will find the introduction to the problem the links below there's our work:
And our conclusions and solutions are here.
2. About Lake Albano
Lake Albano (Italian: Lago Albano or Lago di Castel Gandolfo) is a small volcanic crater lake in the Alban Hills of Lazio, at the foot of Monte Cavo, 20 km (12 mi) southeast of Rome. Castel Gandolfo, overlooking the lake, is the site of the Papal Palace of Castel Gandolfo;
With a depth of about 170 m (560 ft), Lake Albano is the deepest in Lazio. The lake is 3.5 km (2.2 mi) long by 2.3 km (1.4 mi) wide and was formed by the overlapping union of two volcanic craters, an origin indicated by the ridge in its centre, which rises to a height of 70 m (230 ft).
3. About the problem
Lake Albano suffers from a major problem: its water level has dropped by at least 160 metres in the last 100 years. We have decided to investigate the causes of this problem.
4. About ESA
The European Space Agency (ESA) is a 22-member intergovernmental body devoted to space exploration. With its headquarters in Paris and a staff of around 2,200 people globally as of 2022. Its 2024 annual budget was €7.8 billion.
ESA's space flight programme includes human spaceflight (mainly through participation in the International Space Station program); the launch and operation of crewless exploration missions to other planets (such as Mars) and the Moon; Earth observation, science and telecommunication; designing launch vehicles; and maintaining a major spaceport, the Guiana Space Centre at Kourou (French Guiana), France.
5. EO BROWSER
EO Browser makes it possible to browse and compare full-resolution images from all the data collections from ESA. You simply go to your area of interest, select your desired time range and cloud coverage, and inspect the resulting data in the browser. We tried different visualizations and investigated different indexes to determine the width of the lake precisely and download high-resolution images.
We decided to use the False Colour index from sentinel data from 2018-2024.
6. ABOUT SENTINEL
Sentinel-2 is an Earth observation mission from the Copernicus Programme that systematically acquires optical imagery at high spatial resolution (10 m to 60 m) over land and coastal waters. The mission is currently a constellation with two satellites, Sentinel-2A and Sentinel-2B; a third satellite, Sentinel-2C, is currently undergoing testing in preparation for launch in 2024.
The mission supports a broad range of services and applications such as agricultural monitoring, emergency management, land cover classification or water quality.