May 30th to June 3rd 2022 | French Lebanese Summer School on Remote Sensing

Objective

Thanks to the FPACUP European program aiming to support the exploitation of Copernicus data and services, the French Land Data Center Theia organizes in Beirut a French-Lebanese Summer School on Remote Sensing technics, data and products. The objective of this Summer School is to promote the use of Copernicus as well as Theia data and value-added products.

Experts from different French Institutes (INRAE, CNRS, IRD, University of Strasbourg) will attend this Remote Sensing Summer School aiming to encourage European-Lebanese cooperation on the use of Earth Observation data for continental surfaces, to exchange experiences, and to train Lebanese students in this expertise.

The scientific community and the public stakeholders are the main targeted audience of the action, but the private sector can also benefit from synergies and pooling effects. Beside the offered training, some research works using Copernicus data and products will be presented. The use of Sentinel remote sensing data (in particular Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2) and the training of new users in remote sensing will be important points of this summer school.

Four goals

1. Promoting Sentinel remote sensing data and training of new users in remote sensing: downloading data, preprocessing, etc.
2. Teaching to use the remote sensing image processing software OrfeoToolBox (OTB) and QGIS (Open Source softwares for the processing of remote sensing images). OTB and QGIS facilitate the use of remote sensing data: Feature extraction, Calibration, Classification, Segmentation, etc.
3. Promoting Copernicus value-added products and services such as urban maps.
4. Sharing lessons learned on added-value products, developed and produced within Theia such as Building Mapping, Soil Moisture at Very High Spatial Resolution, Disaster Rapid Mapping or Drought Mapping. Theia products and algorithms are complementary to Copernicus products.

Organizers

• Dr. Nicolas BAGHDADI, INRAE, TETIS, Theia, France
• Dr. Hadi JAAFAR, Department of Agriculture, AgHive, American University of Beirut, Lebanon

Program

• Day 1 >> Workshop on ‘Application of Remote Sensing for Water, Environment and Land’.
• Day 2-4 >> Parallel tutorial sessions, each focusing on a given theme: Building mapping, Estimation of soil moisture in agricultural areas using Sentinel-1/2 images, Disaster Rapid Mapping, or Drought mapping. In addition, an initiation session to Remote Sensing Image Processing will be proposed.

Targeted Audience

60 to 80 people, ideally distributed as follows: 50% of academics (professors and students), 25% of public actors (managers or engineers from ministries) and 25% of private actors.
The summer school organized will furthermore be open to neighbouring countries.

Sponsors