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In the world of academia and research, opportunities abound, and for those who aspire to excel in the field, the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR) brings an exciting prospect. The CSIR has recently announced the commencement of the UGC-NET for Junior Research Fellowship (JRF) & Lectureship (LS)/ Assistant Professor for December 2023. If you’re passionate about advancing your academic career and meet the eligibility criteria, this article will guide you through the essential details of this prestigious examination.
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Lufuno Vhengani’s rare skills needed for SA’s official coastal #waterquality tool
Lufuno Vhengani has joined the Earth Observation for Water Quality (EO4WQ) team to help build South Africa’s official tracking tool for coastal and estuary waters.
Vhengani is a space scientist in the broadest sense, since he works with data from space satellites, but he is really the critical bridge between earth scientists and the data they use to make sense of the world.
After graduating with a B.Sc degree in mathematics, physics and mathematical statistics in the early 2000s, the Soweto-born technician ventured into electronics engineering. During a training session as part of a post-grad diploma at Stellenbosch University, he was among those who raised their hands to change their career trajectories to ‘remote sensing’.
Remote sensing broadly refers to detecting (sensing) information about the earth from a distance (remote), such as images or measurements taken by satellites orbiting the earth.
In 2007, a few years after completing a specialist diploma in France, Vhengani joined the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), where he is still a sought-after asset as an earth observation technologist today.
Many also think of him as a developer because he’s a self-taught Python programmer, but he’s quick to correct the misconception. “What I really am is a remote sensing specialist who tries to automate things using the Python programming language,” he says.
He made a name for himself in the earth observation community while working on a project to map areas burnt by wildfire using satellite data. His work eventually fed into the Advanced Fire Information System (AFIS) tool, which is very useful in a region like South Africa where wildfires have a big impact on trees and grasslands, and can cause major harm to infrastructure, homes, people and animals.
Vhengani says that as with wildfires and burnt areas, remote sensing can provide scientists with a wealth of information about water quality. For example, they can use satellite data to pinpoint the location of coastal oil spills or invasive plants, and they can monitor sea surface temperatures and harmful algal blooms.
“Unfortunately, satellite images require some expertise in order to process and interpret,” says Vhengani. “The work that we do provides users with information products that can be used to make decisions. This means our users don't have to go into the process of downloading and processing the data.”
“The EO4WQ tool makes it free and easy for anyone to monitor historical or near real-time changes in water quality, using detailed imagery from the world’s best Earth observation satellites," says the project lead Dr Marié Smith.
Like Vhengani, she is also an Earth observation expert at the CSIR, but with an oceanography background. She’s been working with her EO4WQ team to validate satellite data so that Vhengani can automate the way the data is downloaded, interpreted and visualised on the EO4WQ online interface.
“EO4WQ will be able to give users daily updates in lower spatial resolutions for near-real time tracking, using data from the Copernicus Sentinel-3 satellite. But it will also provide incredibly detailed (but less frequent) images taken by the Copernicus Sentinel-2’s sensors to better understand historical changes in smaller water bodies like estuaries,” says Smith.
Smith’s team has identified the algorithms that work best to produce accurate and useful data that non-experts can trust. Now Vhengani is working on automating these algorithms.
He says that while there are challenges on the user interface side of things, the back-end of the EO4WQ tool is working well.
The team hopes that by December 2023, high resolution data on suspended sediments and chlorophyll levels will be available for anyone to access.
“Success will mean we have worked on something different and new, and something that people can find useful,” says Vhengani.
The EO4WQ prototype is currently hosted on the Cyanolakes website, where it will live until it is ready to become the official Water Quality Decision Support Tool for ocean governance, as part of South Africa’s National Oceans and Coastal Information Management System (OCIMS).
EO4WQ is a collaboration between the CSIR, Cyanolakes and OCIMS, and is funded by the South African National Space Agency (SANSA) through their NRF/NEOFronteirs programme.
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