2017 fieldtrip to soontaga fluxnet tower

The Soontaga station is an EDI Fluxtower installation of the Department of Geography at the University of Tartu, Estonia. We visited one nice winter day.  Later I built some scripts for the field researchers and physical geographers to check and export the data.

Source code: https://github.com/LandscapeGeoinformatics/fluxnet_daily_png 

External real-time graphs: https://kodu.ut.ee/~kmoch/fluxnet_daily/Soontaga_HFdata.html

A geeky intro into Fortran

On the 9th of  November I organised another local coding meetup. This time we got an introduction Introduction to Fortran and Forth in order to understand some of the origins of programming.

Our resident CompSci member Benson prepared and presented the materials and gave us a glance onto these two arcane, almost ancient programming languages. Yet Fortran is still very much alive and used in a variety of high-performance computing (HPC) scenarios.

You can use command line and a simple text editor (vi, emacs, nano, gedit, atom, notepad++, kate). For the faint-hearted Atom ( https://atom.io/ ) has most of the features we needed for this session, is open and cross platform.

Links to Fortran language standard and tutorial:

• Standards committee: https://wg5-fortran.org/
• Tutorial: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Fortran_77_Tutorial

While Benson prepared a preconfigured VM for us, you can try out Fortran with a Gnu Fortran GCC installed by yourself, and maybe even Eclipse Fortran IDE:

• https://www.eclipse.org/ptp/
• https://www.eclipse.org/photran/

Links to Forth language standard and tutorial:

• Standard: https://forth-standard.org/
• Tutorial: http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/gforth/Docs-html/
• Example simple interpreter: https://github.com/howerj/libforth
• Example interpreter for educational purposes: https://github.com/sayon/forthress

The materials are also collated on my GitHub account again. Happy coding :-)

Copernicus info session November 2017 in Tallinn, Estonia

On the 6th of November 2017, several Geoinformatics staff member of the Department of Geography and our international MSc in Geography/Geoinformatics students of the University of Tartu jointly attended the Copernicus Info Session in Tallinn.

The event was held in Tallinn in the conference rooms of the Building of Ministries as the eleventh in a series of national Copernicus events of the European Commission. We had several international visitors as well national estonian officials. For example we had the chance to meet with members of the Estonian Landboard, ESTCube and other innovative satellite data processing companies, and even the Estonian National Library.

One really interesting presentation was summarising the Sentinel mission really well:

After the event about the European Copernicus programme finished we used the "field trip" to visit the Tallinn old town, and we we did a nice walk in the event.

Online references to the event:

http://www.copernicus.eu/events/copernicus-training-and-information-session-estonia

and

http://copernicus.eu/infosession-estonia