Free Sample
The Complete Guide to Becoming A Remote Sensing Scientist and Technologist
What you'll really do, earn, and need to break into remote sensing - with honest numbers, day-to-day detail, and a clear yes-or-no decision framework
by Alumigogo Books
Chapter 1: What Does a Remote Sensing Scientist and Technologist Actually Do?
Let's start with what you probably think this job is, and then get to what it really is. You might imagine someone looking at stunning satellite images of the earth, maybe tracking hurricanes or watching forests recover from wildfires. That part does happen - and it can be genuinely exciting - but it is maybe ten percent of the work. The other ninety percent is what I'm going to walk you through here: the data, the code, the problem-solving, and the grind of turning raw pixels into something other people can actually use.
A remote sensing scientist and technologist is, at the core, a translator. You work with data that is captured by sensors - on satellites orbiting the earth, on airplanes, on drones - and you turn that data into information. The data itself is just numbers: millions and billions of measurements of light reflected off the ground, heat emitted by the earth's surface, or radar waves bouncing back from the terrain. Your job is to figure out what those numbers mean, and then to package that meaning in a way that a farmer, a city planner, a climate researcher, or a military analyst can act on. If that sounds like a mix of physics, computer science, and geography, that's because that's exactly what it is.
Let me give you a concrete example of a typical project. Say a state government wants to know how much of