AI and Satellite Technology Help Protect The Environment
After decades of industrial revolution resulting in soil, water, and air pollution, modern technology development offers ways of helping people in environmental cleanup and preservation. There are plenty of modern technological innovations designed specifically for environmental pollution reduction purposes. In this piece, we will cover the ways in which specifically satellite and AI technologies help with environmental monitoring, cleanup, and preservation.
Modern Technology and Environment
Before moving to technologies themselves, let’s go through the key areas these technologies cover when it comes to environmental protection.
Water Quality
Big issue that reduces water quality is the runoff of agricultural chemicals (fertilizer, pesticides, and animal waste). To battle this issue, modern technology offers remote sensing to identify and manage this problem. Remote sensing technology is usually leveraged by different tools that cater to the agricultural sector (https://eos.com/products/crop-monitoring/) and a variety of other industries.
Waste Management
For a long time, naturally occurring microorganisms were used to disrupt human, industrial, and municipal organic wastes. But now, modern, genetically engineered organisms can be used to treat both hazardous waste and harmful chemicals.
Energy
One of the biggest reasons for rising energy consumption is the increase in vehicle ownership and the distances traveled per vehicle. However, modern technology, especially electronics, has made it possible to significantly reduce the vehicular emissions of volatile organic compounds and carbon monoxide per mile traveled.
Climate
The use of energy inevitably affects the Earth’s climate due to greenhouse gas emissions from the use of petroleum and coal in transportation and generation of electricity. To solve this issue, modern technology offers small gas turbines and fuel cells that are way more environmentally friendly if compared to large power plants.
Now, let’s move specifically to satellite technology and the ways it helps to monitor all of the above issues to preserve the environment.
Satellite Technology Assisting Environmental Protection
Satellite remote sensing is a great opportunity for any purpose that requires observation, analysis, and management of large or inaccessible areas. The diversity of information that can be retrieved from satellite data is currently huge. For instance, integrating satellite data with data received from ground sensors enables tracking the distributions of certain animal species, detection of issues associated with oil spills, illegal fishing, etc.
Apart from that, scientists can use satellite data to monitor forests for detecting droughts and threatening weather events. Since trees play critical roles in the carbon cycle, satellite-retrieved information can help understand more about that too. Overall, the use of satellites in forestry enables forest health monitoring, learning more about the carbon cycle in the atmosphere, and predicting possible wildfires.
Satellite remote sensing is a powerful toolkit that allows for non-invasive environmental monitoring, including water, soil, plants, and animals, and waste accumulation. And the possibilities are constantly growing.
AI-based Platforms Assisting Environmental Protection
Now, lets’ see what modern AI technologies offer for environmental preservation.
Urban Sustainability Optimization
AI can be used to create an online city dashboard with real-time data on water and energy consumption and availability, traffic and people flows, and more. This will help not only to optimise urban sustainability but preserve resources and hence the environment.
Weather Prediction
AI currently revolutionizes weather forecasting and improves the overall understanding of the climate change’ effects. Developments in AI have enabled PC’s to have enough power even if compared to today’s supercomputers, which allows for cutting costs on research and fostering scientific productivity.
Electric Vehicles Connection and Automation
Autonomous vehicles (AVs) guided by AI offer an opportunity for people to shift towards the principle of on-demand mobility. This implies reduction of greenhouse gas emission due to route and traffic optimisation, availability of autonomous carpool services, and eco-driving algorithms.
Each year modern technology offers new ways and opportunities to mitigate the adverse effect of industrial revolution on the environment. One of these technologies are satellite monitoring and AI, aimed at fixing environment-related issues via offering new ways of their detection and analysis.
