NOAA CoastWatch Satellite Course 
Micronesia - March 25-29, 2024 

Welcome to the NOAA CoastWatch Satellite Course!

This course is being offered in collaboration with the Pacific Islands Ocean Observing System (PacIOOS). The goal of the course is to familiarize participants with different types of ocean satellite data, different tools, and teach participants how to use satellite data in their own research/work using their choice of software (R, python, ArcGIS/QGIS, Matlab). This course will be conducted entirely online. Anyone is free to sign-up for the course, although it is targeted at participants in the Micronesia region and the live sessions are scheduled to align with their work day. All of the course materials are available online and participants will go through them at their own pace (including starting before the official start date of the course if desired), but there is a suggested list of modules to cover for each day of the course. 

At the start of each day (9 am Chamorro Standard Time, 4 pm PDT) there will be a live session where we will preview the material participants should go over that day, discuss the previous day’s material, and answer any questions.  

Participants should expect to spend about 1 hour/day in live sessions and at least 3-4 hours/day working on their own, going through the course material at their own pace and working on their project. Instructors will be available during the week to answer questions or help troubleshoot, on demand. The last day will be a 2-3 hour student presentation day 

During the course of the trainng participants will watch narrated presentations covering:

• remote sensing basics
• example applications of satellite data
• sea surface temperature
• ocean color (chlorophyll, PAR, Kd490, ....)
• altimetry (sea surface height, currents)
• wind
• salinity
• water quality (optional)
• sea ice (optional) 
• synthetic aperture radar (optional)
• which dataset to choose
• overview of different tools and platforms to access data

The individual presentations are 10-20 minutes long, and the total length of time to watch all of them is ~3 hours, however some of lectures are optional.  While the intention is that participants will watch these during the week of the training, they are available online now and can be watched anytime.

The course also features various tutorials on NetCDF data, Panoply, ERDDAP, R, Python, and ArcGIS. It is expected that participants will follow materials for one software, not all of them.

Participants will work on a short personal project to better assimilate the course contents and leave the class with ready to use scripts adapted to their needs. For instance, sample projects could include generating satellite derived data view to understand the impacts of heat stress on an island or understanding the impacts of the current El Nino on sea surface height to help understand king tides. Participants will make a short presentation (1 slide, 2 minutes) on their project at the end of the course. 

Instructors:

Cara WIlson (CoastWatch/West Coast Node and PolarWatch)
Dale Robinson (CoastWatch/West Coast Node and PolarWatch)
Sunny Hospital (PolarWatch)
Daisy Shi (Pacific OceanWatch)
Melanie Abecassis (CoastWatch Central) 

For more information about the CoastWatch training resources, you can visit our Learning Portal.

Register Now!