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by anonfunction 79 days ago
Funnily enough, I did find a few satellite sources at the beginning for the map background and noticed that all the ships seemed to be scrubbed from the image. It's an interesting idea, thanks for the comment!

The sources I used were:

- ESRI World Imagery[1] — free satellite tiles, high-res, but ships are stripped out from the imagery

- NASA GIBS - VIIRS[2] — near real-time daily satellite imagery from NASA, but resolution is ~375m so ships aren't visible anyway

- Mapbox Satellite[3] — high-res and looks great, but same deal — ships are scrubbed from the composited imagery

1. https://server.arcgisonline.com/ArcGIS/rest/services/World_I... 2. https://earthdata.nasa.gov/engage/open-data-services-softwar... 3. https://www.mapbox.com

3 comments

Ai2 has vessel detection models for Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 (ESA) along with Landsat 8, Landsat 9, and VIIRS Nighttime Lights (NASA/USGS/NOAA):

- Sentinel-2 (10 m/pixel): https://github.com/allenai/rslearn_projects/blob/master/docs...

- Landsat (15-30 m/pixel): https://github.com/allenai/rslearn_projects/blob/master/docs...

- VIIRS Nighttime Lights: https://github.com/allenai/vessel-detection-viirs

I think you can see these vessel detections at https://app.skylight.earth/ ("Try out a limited version as a guest") but they seem to be delayed by 48 hours.

VIIRS is very low resolution but you can make out vessels with reasonable accuracy in the night-time images.

VIIRS covers most locations at least once per day, but the other sensors capture a given location only once per 5-10 days (although when combined, Sentinel-1/Sentinel-2/Landsat should provide close-to-daily coverage).

There is also a lot of jamming, manipulating, and fake AIS broadcasting going on

https://windward.ai/blog/gps-jamming-disrupts-1100-ships-in-...

It turns out during a war having real time satellite imagery of shipping would be a poor choice.
but what about other experiments, just saying, it's subjective

you could, presumably, mess up other instruments than visual to interfere with enemy countries

"Nice crop watering prediction model you have there, shame if someone modified source data and your crops would falter..."
grim times

and you just know governments will do supply chain style attacks.

Crypto AG cia front company, encryption devices

backdoor in RSA key generation by nsa

exploding pagers

usa installing bugs in enterprise router exports

modifying the data is crazy

doesn't this sort of thing invalidate any kind of experiment because the instrument is no longer trustworthy

Most of them remove clouds for similar reasons - moving/temporary stuff in individual images makes the underlying data useless.