I’ve downloaded a bunch of Landsat 8 data over the Middle East that I am planning to use to create training data for land use classification (like I did in this paper). Exploring satellite data is very useful for finding interesting research questions. In this False Color Composite from summer 2015 it’s quite evident that…
In a paper I’m working on where I’m classifying cropland in the Duhok governorate I had to mix preprocessed Landsat Surface Reflectance data with some raw scenes that I had to convert to Surface Reflectance using the Dark Object Subtraction (DOS) method (as described in Song et al. 2001). This was because those scenes were…
Some time ago I wrote about how the food security in Iraq had been affected by decades of war and suppression by the Iraqi regime. After researching and summarizing that subject I decided to investigate if changes in agriculture, potentially induced by conflicts, were visible in satellite images in my own study area, the Duhok…
In order to understand Iraq and Kurdistan Region’s potential for developing food security in a sustainable way, it is important to look back at the political changes that have shaped Iraq’s food production in the past 30 years. This post is a brief summary of the events affecting food security in Iraq since the 1980’s,…
I’ve found two academic articles and a few different UN/IOM reports covering the drought in 2007-2009 in Iraq. I thought it would be a good exercise to summarize what is known about this drought in Iraqi Kurdistan, and to argue for the added value of another drought assessment – which is what I’m working on…
I made a small and rather simple poster for the environmental science forum meeting about communicating science to policymakers and society, but unfortunately climate variations forced me to leave early to catch the last train before the storm would reach strengths that would prevent any kind of travel in southern Sweden. So instead I decided…
Since I don’t appreciate processing data, I always try to avoid it as much as possible and one thing that I really want to avoid is radiometric correction of satellite images (it just confuses me). So after downloading a ton of free Landsat images for my study area from Earth Explorer, I didn’t have a…
Population and Environment in the Middle East 