IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - September 2017 - 61

BY COLIN SCHWEGMANN

The Reinvigorated South African GRSS Chapter

he South African Chapter of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (GRSS), originally founded in 1991,
was recently reinstated in 2014. It currently represents the
only active GRSS Chapter in Africa and has members from
two primary areas within South Africa: the Western Cape
(Cape Town) and Gauteng (Johannesburg/Pretoria). Previous Chapter cochairs include Dr. Waldo Kleynhans, research
group leader for the Satellite Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR)
Group at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research
(CSIR), and Dr. Jeanine Engelbrecht, principal researcher for
the Satellite SAR Group at CSIR, both of whom served from
2014 to 2015. Other prominent members include current Cochairs Dr. Daniel O'Hagan, associate professor in radar at the
University of Cape Town, and Colin Schwegmann (Figure 1), a
researcher with the Satellite SAR Group at CSIR.
The members of our Chapter represent a wide scientific
and engineering background and hold positions in various departments at the University of Pretoria, University
of Stellenbosch, University of Cape Town, University College London, and CSIR. The community has strong ties to
a number of geoscience and remote-sensing research areas,
ranging from land-cover classification using optical/light
detection and ranging data to SAR research into agricultural development, subsidence monitoring, and maritime
domain awareness.
MEETINGS AND ACTIVITIES
In addition to meetings conducted to plan how it will
progress, the GRSS South African Chapter has hosted a
number of sessions to educate our relatively new geoscience and remote-sensing community. In April 2014, the
Chapter hosted Dr. Erika Podest of NASA's Jet Propulsion
Lab, whose lecture titled "Introduction to the Soil Moisture
Active Passive (SMAP) Mission" provided a thorough discussion of the goals of the SMAP mission and the various
instruments on board the SMAP satellite.
Later that year, in October 2014, the Chapter coorganized
the African Association of Remote Sensing of the Environment (AARSE) Conference. This event brought together approximately 200 researchers from around Africa to discuss
pertinent topics relating to geoscience and remote-sensing
research being done on the continent. Prior to the conferDigital Object Identifier 10.1109/MGRS.2017.2715218
Date of publication: 14 September 2017

SEPTEMBER 2017

IEEE GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING MAGAZINE

ence, a two-part educational summer school was held. The
first part constituted a week-long symposium in which students attended courses such as Introduction to Remote Sensing for Educators, Introduction to Remote Sensing for Local
Authorities, Spectrometry and Spatial Analysis, Scientific
Writing Workshop, and Introduction to the SMAP Satellite
Mission. This was followed by a two-day series of lectures
by notable GRSS members including Prof. Mike Inggs
(Figure 2), Dr. Melba M. Crawford, Prof. Lorenzo Bruzzone

FIGURE 2. Prof. Michael Inggs
FIGURE 1. Colin Schwegmann

is a member of the South African Chapter of the GRSS and
a researcher with the Satellite
SAR Group at CSIR.

is a full professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering,
University of Cape Town, South
Africa. He is also a former director of education for the GRSS.

FIGURE 3. Prof. Lorenzo Bruzzone (left) with former South African

GRSS Chapter Cochair Dr. Waldo Kleynhans at the 2014 AARSE
Summer School, University of Johannesburg. Prof. Bruzzone is a
full professor of telecommunications at the University of Trento,
Italy, a GRSS Distinguished Lecturer, and editor-in-chief of IEEE
Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine.
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