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What twenty-five years of this work actually looks like
A call with John Amos, who founded SkyTruth in 2001 and has spent longer than I have been alive watching the ocean from orbit. Funding, patience, one celebrity's satellite project, and the case for building the boring, public, attributable tool instead of the impressive one.
Nine metres, thirty minutes
A glacier collapsed above the Nepal border on 26 August 2026. Seismometers on the other side of the planet knew about it before the valley did. This is what that gap is made of, and what closing it would actually require.
The coastline you need is older than the radar
A community remembers a shoreline from the 1990s. Free SAR does not exist before 2014. Which instrument answers the question is not a preference, and the honest answer changes what you can promise.
Speckle is not noise, and that changes how you remove it
Every radar image arrives covered in grain. Treating it like sensor noise is the most common mistake in the field, and it quietly destroys the thing you were trying to measure.
Who gets looked at
The same earthquake kills nobody in one country and a hundred thousand in another. The systems built to find the people it will kill are trained on data that already skipped them. Both of those are measured findings, and together they are worse than either.
What synthetic aperture radar actually sees
Every other Earth observation instrument waits for the world to cooperate. Radar brings its own light, and that one difference decides what it is good for and what it is useless at.
Ask for the one you need.
If there is something here you have had to work out the hard way, tell me and it goes on the list.
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