 Good morning everyone and welcome to EU 23's next press conference, which is titled, Science at Night. I will shortly introduce our speakers in a minute or two. I just wanted to give a quick background that out of 17,000 abstracts submitted to EU's meeting, we've selected the top most interesting presentations to present to you during the press conferences. Each press conference will have time for speakers to make their presentations one after the other, followed by a common question and answer round at the end, which should be about 10-15 minutes. I like to welcome all of our speakers today. We are joined by speakers both present in the room here as well as online. So introducing speakers from my right, this is Ekta Agarwal from the Imperial College London Department of Earth Science and Engineering London. Then we have our speakers who are joining us virtually. Can we have them on screen? Yes. So that is Dilu and Ching Ling Zhang from Sun Yat Sen University, School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, China. And then we are followed again by our speakers present in the room. So that's Esgi Ashiro and Giorgi Kirillin from the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Indian Fisheries, Berlin, Germany. So welcome all of you and all the best. We look forward to hearing your findings. We will begin with Ekta for today. Thank you, Ching Ling. You helped me how to change the slides. Okay. Thank you everyone. Well, I'm Ekta and I'm working in Imperial College London with Alex Whitaker and Sanjeev Gupta, one of my supervisors already in the room. And I'm actually today presenting to you that how nightlights can be used as a tool to study flood exposure, recovery and vulnerability with respect to the recent flood event that happened in Pakistan in the Indus Basin in August 2022. So to give just a brief overview, I'm one of the PhD students of the EU Funded Maricuri ITN Source to Sync project where we are a group of 15 PhD students working on different dynamics in Basin. And I'm working on the basically human aspect in our, you know, learning about the human dynamics in a particular source to sink basin. So we are a group of 15 students across various universities in Europe, and also working with many international organizations. So to start with, I would first like to show a time lapse. How am I able to click. I'm sorry. So it was basically a time lapse of the satellite sentinel image, where we could show that how the how the area was flooded during the during that particular flood event. And there's an inset over there in the corner, we see that how that the we basically see the area where there was a high rainfall above the normal rainfall in that particular period. So to give a human face to give a human aspect to it, these are few snapshot of the recent event and the devastation it had caused as per the data almost 30 million people were affected by it or about one third of the country was affected by it. But to understand. So, like the occurrence of such flood events actually motivated or, you know, led us to thought that what are the source to sink or landscape parameters influencing this human presence near the river bodies. And for which that motivated us to, you know, think about that. Are we able to quantify human presence near the river. Then, second was, we all know that river is not a homogeneous body. It has a very dynamic landscape to it. So is it is the human presence varying with respect to different channel patterns in the basin and third the most important is if the flood exposure and recovery is a different for different socio economic classes on the flood plains in the basin. So we are working on these questions are actually exploring these questions with the help of very interesting and cool satellite data set, which is the night lights data, it actually captures the radiance during the nighttime. So here is a snapshot or the Indian Peninsula. Well, the PDA it's a PDF so I couldn't show the whole of the mid, but yeah so here we have the snapshot over the whole of Indian Peninsula. The white pixels are basically the bright areas where high high radiance was captured during the nighttime and the dark areas are basically where there was no capture of the data. So it was very interesting to you know see and the one more thing like these are the products released by NASA. So it was very interesting to actually think about if we can use this data to quantify human presence with respect to these landscape parameters. I just mentioned to you about. So here is an example of the average distribution of night lights over the Indus basin. It's one of the most populous basin in the world covering and has an area for about more than a million square kilometer square and covering about four countries which are Pakistan, China and Afghanistan. So there are a few key points in this figure, you can see that how pixels are very well distributed within the flood plain. We hardly see any presence in the mountainous areas or in the deserts. Third is how beautifully it is following the river patterns in the basin and forth which is not at all related to this study is the how nicely it captures the India Pakistan border in in in this kind of data set. So it was interesting to think about if we were able to quantify human presence using this data near the rivers and in our existing work, we are able to show that there was 26% of enhancement of late pixels with respect to the basin as a whole in the 0 to 5 kilometer proximity of the river. Next, so we now wanted to understand whether you know intense if we could capture the the basically the impact of this high intensity flood event from space. And for that we are using the daily daily night lights data to understand the flood recovery and exposure within the flood plains of the area affected. So here is an example of the monthly composite August was the period when maximum devastation had taken place. May was basically pre high precipitation period so we are basically considering me as the month before precipitation and we wanted to understand if there was change in, you know, presence of night lights, and September is post flooding event. So here very nicely, you can see in the month of August, this absence of, okay. This absence of, of late pixels over there and we like the, the, the lights have went off and in September we start to see those lights again so we could infer that yes, we can capture the impact, but how much is the impact we are still exploring it's an ongoing study and how how the area has recovered. So these are our further questions. Now, yeah, and also to understand that which areas were highly impacted due to this flood event, we calculated the percentage decline in radians. So in the first figure in the August to May ratio you can see many red and orange color pixels. So we are basically particular areas where we could say that you know, these particular areas had high flood vulnerability to human presence specifically. And that's what we are interested now if these areas had high vulnerability, but is it the same for different socio economic classes, we don't know. At the moment we are using the smart data by European Commission, which gives us an idea about the built up and population in a particular area. So here is a simplified version of the data on x axis we have the percentage decline in the radians in that particular flooding period on y axis we have the flood exposure in terms of area kilometer square. And we have three classes which are rural urban cluster and urban center based on the classes classified by the European Commission and we have reclassified them in terms of population and built up areas. Overall, we can see that in, like, with the overall rural communities are the ones who are highly exposed to this kind of flood event. And second, when we see that the percentage decline in radians is high, which is about 50 to 75 person, then the flood exposure is very much similar to both rural and urban cluster. And our next question is, if they have similar flood exposure. So, do they have same recovery. Do they have different recovery. I don't know personally, we are still working on it. And next, and the second aspect to it is because it was a high intensity flood event. So, like, it would be interesting to also see whether it follows the same pattern like same recovery pattern with respect to the different intensity flood in this particular area. So, lastly, the key takeaway points from my presentation are that we were able to quantify human presence. In the in this basin with the help of the night lights data and second maximum number of the majority of area had a maximum had a minimum decline of 25 percentage in radians. And lastly, these data can actually be used to estimate the flood exposure and recovery time period. And the information gathered from this kind of study can help the community to understand what kind of situation they are living in, and also help the policymakers and government to, you know, and to basically understand which area to focus the disaster management in in an event of occurrence of such flooding event like this. So, and I would like to acknowledge my colleagues from Imperial College London my S to S project colleagues over there. Yeah, thank you. I'm open to questions. Thank you very much, we will now hear from our virtual speakers, do you and Ching Ling, John. So, we are just going to load your slides which will take a couple of minutes, and then you are welcome to start your presentation, unless the speakers want to share their slides. Okay, they are. Yes, hello, we can hear you. We can hear you but your video is off. So, can you do a quick adjustment please we cannot see you. Okay, any chance that you can hear us. We would like to see your video and hear your audio as well please. Okay, I think in the interest of time you will move to our next speakers and in the meantime, if our virtual speakers could please check their audio and video, because we can see your slides we can see you moving forward we cannot hear you or see you. We will move on to Esgi and Georgie please. And then we will come back to our virtual speakers. Thank you. Thank you for inviting us. Our story is about very long nights taking place to the north of the polar circle. The circle is breathing at sleep, respiration like a lake during a polar night. So, why we actually started this study and why we are interested in what's happening under eyes of lakes. Studies of lakes under eyes started maybe 20 years ago before we didn't know anything about them. Normally it was assumed that lakes are sleeping and nothing is happening between two open water periods, but actually we found out that dynamics under eyes is very, very complex and has many different facets. Still, most of attention was put on the period of spring, where solar radiation penetrates eyes and the period before the eyes comes, and the period of the polar night was not attended. Actually, it has no light, so we don't have any photosynthesis, we don't have any contact to atmosphere and all these lakes which are thousands to the north of the polar circle. We still remain uninvestigated and we just want to understand what's happening when climate change or global change affect this period there. And that's why we started our studies on Lake Kupi theory and the question we stated for us, what is the metabolism? Is the lake really sleeping? Is there any life and how active it is there? The main parameter we try to estimate was oxygen and we look for connection between oxygen as an integrated parameter for the whole metabolism or microbial activity and physical parameters which are driven by climate, like water temperature, mixing currents and lake morphometry, like lake depths, these parameters affect oxygen and lakes, because we move by any reason. Now, very shortly about our measure findings there, I can show you on the left panel you can see the vertical distribution of respiration rates. So how do they breathe on the rise? And there is a certain pattern with increased vertical gradient towards the bottom and respiration, which is more or less consistent between different years. The deeper it is, the more active is the respiration, but on the right panel, there are several lines showing sediment respiration at different years and you can see that they're quite variable from year to year. So it's very sensitive to what is happening before the ice storms, before the whole night starts, and very sensitive to the conditions during this very long period of several months. And at this point, I would like to hand over to ASG, the real night specialist who did the study and he knows all the details about it. Thank you very good. I will continue with where we are conducting this study. We are working on Lake Kipisei. It is located in the northern Finland. There is a very nice biological station of Haslick University, which can provide very good facilities for our project and we are taking samples and saving the data from Kipisei since 2013. Lake Kipisei is an ice-covered lake. It is ultra oligotrophic and it is covered with ice for almost seven months. And here we can see the light properties of the lake. Actually, the polar nights are starting in the first of December, but even after the polar nights, we can see that the solar radiation is still very low until the 20th of April. Mainly, we are focusing on this period for this study. So our lake is in darkness, like almost for four months. It's a long time for biological activities. So we can shortly see our methods in here. We are using an autonomous high-resolution oxygen and temperature measurements. And on the left-hand side, there is a very basic illustration of our boys and measurement devices. We are using temperature and dissolved oxygen loggers. And it is 43 meters long. And on the middle image, we can see how the physical parameters can affect the physics and biogeochemistry under the ice, such as solar radiation, temperature and density changes. And there is one example of temperature and oxygen records belongs to 2020 winter time. As it can be seen, the lake temperature is changing between zero and four degrees. But starting from the December, actually, we can see that the deepest part of the lake is becoming anoxic, like in a very short time. And now it is not our main focus, but it can create anaerobic conditions which can lead to production of methane gases. And here we can see what actually we are going to focus as a next step. I mean, now we are working on the polar nights and dark time of the year, but then we will start working on the ice-covered period with solar radiation. So with that time, we can see how our respiration rates can actually respond to solar radiation and primary production. And we can see how the solar radiation is increasing after 20 of April, so it will be a good opportunity to research on this subject. And if you have any questions, you can see our contact details here. Thank you. Thank you very much. And now the good news is we can see our virtual speakers. We can have their video and if you can also share your slides, we will let you know we can see and hear you. Hello. Can you hear me? Yes, we can loud and clear. Okay, can you, can you see my slide? Not yet. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, yeah, we can see it. One second please. Oh, sorry. Yes, you're ready to begin. We're sorry about this inconvenience. No problem, it happens. Hello everyone. And we will start our talk. We are honored to have this chance to share our study in the Arctic region. Our talk, the title is studying how ice and snow behave in the Arctic with the special satellite cameras. My name is Zhang Qingli, and the UD is my PhD students. We are from Sinyasen University channel. This is a big picture about the background as we know Arctic Ocean actually is a region very sensitive to climate change. And we can see in March, the sea ice actually will grow dramatically and the reach is maximum in March. It also melts in the summer, and the reaching is minimum in September. So we actually recently started to show that the Arctic Ocean, the sea ice actually declined 2.5% per decade. And also there is a big seasonal variation as we can see. So in this week, make a conclusion that even during the dark, polarized periods, the sea ice in this region actually changes dramatically. So that requires an urgent need to monitor Arctic Ocean continues, especially during dark, polarized periods. This is the background, so why we carry out this study. And as the previous research, just as the research showed, we have the now a special satellite camera on board in this space provides us a capability to see the ground surface in the even when there is no sunlight. As we can see there when there is no sunlight with the moon on. Actually, we can see a lot of features on the Earth's surface. So in this study, we use a data from a special satellite camera. It's called a real DMV. The previous research as we showed is fantastic images. But in this study, in our study, we focus on regions without artificial lights like a street lights. We only see to test the capability of this camera to see Arctic regions, even when there is no sunlight with the faint moonlight. So as we know that there is a long period in the Arctic regions, when there is no sunlight, but fortunately we have moonlight each month. We have illuminated polar regions. So these are allowing us to see porno snow ice and their, their change, even during the polarized periods. And this is our results. Actually, we focused on as a research project. We, we chose a small but small region compared to the entire polar region. And this, this, this location actually is, we know that there is a global seed vault actually located in this island. And the reason we chose this, this, this archipelago is not only because of this, it's because of the location is location, located actually. It looks like they're frozen again. Can you hear us by any chance because your video has frozen. If you can hear us, maybe try rejoining and we can give you a minute or two apologies to everyone for the interruption. We'll give them another minute or so. But if we don't hear back from them, then you can contact them later if you'd like to have a few informal or formal chats or interviews, I can send you their details. Yeah, we can see our slides moving now, which is good, but we cannot see a video anymore. Maybe you can minimize the screen so that we can read their takeaway messages. Yeah. Okay. Apologies again for that unfortunately doesn't look like we're going to hear back from our speakers. So we will just now move on to the next part of our press conference, which is the question and answer round. So if you have any questions for our speakers today, if they are for the onsite speakers then you're most welcome to either raise your hand and I'll come to you with a microphone. And if they are the virtual speakers then feel free to write to me and I will send you their contact information. If you're joining us virtually you can leave your questions either in the chat or you can use the hand raising function and zoom and I will come to you for your question. So if anyone has any questions for our speakers. So the floor is yours. Okay, we have a question coming. Hi, my name is Catherine and I'm with the EU press team here. I was curious for the team who did the research in Finland. The extent of your collaboration with the semi council to coordinate this research. Sorry, what was the question? Oh, did you collaborate with the council to coordinate the research? Were they involved? Not yet. In the project. At least not yet. About 10 years of research there, mostly collaborating with the University of Helsinki. This certain project actually the initiative of German Ministry of Education for Education and Research in collaboration with our Finnish colleagues in the University of Helsinki. Thank you. Do we have any other questions coming in doesn't seem to be any questions on the chat from our virtuals because virtual journalists. Okay, there are no more questions we are ready to conclude our press briefing. Thank you once again to all of our speakers for joining us today. They are available if you'd like to ask any questions through the week you can run them through me and I'll be happy to facilitate. A reminder this press conference was recorded and we will upload it later in the day to each use YouTube channel. And we have another press conference planned for later today at 2pm. The title is called what can chocolate cereal and water say about food security and sustainability. So that's another exciting one to look forward to and I hope to see some of you there. Thank you once again and enjoy the rest of your day.