The Hubei Provincial Meteorological Bureau (HPMB) is one of the provincial branches of the China Meteorological Administration, which is the national weather service for the People's Republic of China.  HPMB wanted to easily share a variety of weather and ecological information products to with the citizens of Hubei Province.

To achieve this goal, the HPMB developed a remote sensing service platform that is accessible from their website. The platform combines advanced enterprise ENVI® image analytics in a friendly user interface, which provides an intuitive experience for users to access weather and ecological information.

How It Works

HPMB needed to automatically generate a variety of image products from a broad range of satellite data to allow users to easily browse, download and visualize the results.

The HPMB platform can support and display the following major satellite data and weather sources: FY3-VIRR/MERSI, MODIS, NPP-VIIRS, geo-stationary satellites such as FY-4 and Himawari-8, and high-resolution satellites such as GF1, GF2 and more.

The remote sensing platform also includes data catalog tools for querying, browsing and downloading data. Further, the data analysis and statistical reporting can also be conducted and visualized online. These on-demand statistical analysis can be conducted by spatial extents of province, city and county, and by monthly or annual temporal extents to see trends in the data.

ENVI supplies the enterprise components and framework, aligning the data, analytics and computing power in the cloud. The service architecture and ENVI analysis engines are then used by web clients to access and analyze on-demand remotely sensed data. Relying on ENVI analytics and ENVI Enterprise, HPMB’s server-level remote sensing platform can automatically generate twelve thematic product dataset results including: water body regional analysis; urban heat islands; aerosol hot spots; vegetation analysis; forest fire locations; and a meteorological evaluation of the overall ecological quality within Hubei Province.

Users can complete complex and specialized remote sensing image analysis and generate a thematic result by completing the following steps online:

1. Browse the web portal and select an area or time range of interest
2. View the results of available data and thematic output options
3. Select the desired thematic output result, data set and view associated statistics
4. Submit the request to the ENVI enterprise job manager for processing
5. View the thematic data result online

Once the analysis is completed, the output results, maps, and statistics can be viewed online.

To the right is an example of the overall HPMB remote sensing service platform and a specific fire hot spot monitoring result.

Figure 1: This image shows an overview of the remote sensing service platform. The product sharing portal provides the ability to query, browse and download image and thematic products, as well on-demand analysis and statistics.

Figure 2: Data options are easy to select, allowing users to query conditions, data and statistics in real time. A variety of data choices can be viewed simultaneously, making it easy to use.

Figure 3: On demand statistics are available for the user to also select and view. This bar chart shows the average value of vegetation and net primary production (NPP) products in 17 cities at any given time. Users can choose and view the results by city, time, and zoom and with specific statistic parameters.

Figure 4: Using the fire product analysis tool, users can select the sensor type and time range desired and submit the query to the ENVI enterprise job manager to process the fire monitoring product. This image shows  the query result for fire hot spot monitoring.

Figure 5: The red and green values in this image show an Enhanced Vegetation Index Layer around the Yangtze River, a known fire monitoring position. As the values get closer to 1.0, the result is greener which means the areas are more covered by vegetation. These advanced analytics are important to help assess changes in vegetation and to monitor the overall ecological quality for a city, county or any spatial extent.

Figure 6: In this thematic product result, the yellow circle represents crop-zone fire locations, and the red circle represents forest-zone fire locations. Forest fire Location 1 is at 310 meters East of Bashanzhai, Wuhan, Hubei, showing 2 square kilometers. The Forest Fire Location 2 is at 707 meters northeast of Shangwuchang, Huangshi, Hubei, showing 1 square kilometer.

ENVI enterprise solutions provide customers with a framework and analysis components that can be put together like puzzle pieces to solve specific problems. End users who may not have a remote sensing background can easily choose inputs and view immediate results. This on-demand information can be shared with colleagues and acted upon.

For more information on enterprise solutions that feature ENVI analytics click here or email geospatialinfo@nv5.com.