Recent content on Jerónimo Luza
Large language models are here to stay, and I thought it’d be a good idea to write a post about how to download one and run it locally on a personal computer. Of course, this same explanation applies if you’re using a virtual machine in the cloud (AWS, GCP)—the key difference lies in hardware limitations and the size of the models you’re able to run. A personal computer will rarely match the…
This post will showcase some applications of one of NASA’s most well-known satellite products: the Black Marble nightlights suite. This set of remotely sensed products allows us to observe how the Earth looks at night, with countless applications in areas such as disaster response, economic activity monitoring, energy infrastructure tracking, and more. Let’s dive in! Figure 1: Nighttime…
After spending some time working with GIS files on a daily basis, I realized there’s no comfortable and practical tool for quickly inspecting or transforming files with georeferenced vector data. Having to write three lines of code in a script or in the Python interpreter every time I want to transform geometries feels like a lot, and the sluggishness of desktop applications like ArcGIS and QGIS…
A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to work with NASA’s MODIS NDVI data. Utilizing an example script from the HDF - EOS Tools and Information Center as reference, I developed a program that takes an area of interest, a start date, and an end date, then downloads and processes the corresponding NDVI data from NASA archives. The program leverages parallel processing to efficiently convert…
One of the most common data requests in geospatial data science is obtaining the road network within a given administrative boundary. This includes identifying road locations, classifying road types, and calculating the total road length within a region—an essential analysis for various applications. OpenStreetMap (OSM) is widely recognized as the go-to source for road network data, thanks to its…
The next article is an ArcGIS StoryMap embedded in an iframe. Some features may not work correctly.
The Problem If you work with Amazon Web Services (AWS) Athena SQL, chances are that you’ve encountered the following error: Query exhausted resources at this scale factor This generally indicates that you are hitting memory limits on the Athena cluster that runs your query (reference 1, reference 2, reference 3). AWS provides several performance optimization strategies, including data…
A few months ago I had the opportunity to work with the PM2.5 data provided by the Washington University in St. Louis. The initiative comprises a collection of estimated global and regional annual and monthly satellite-derived ground-level fine particulate matter (PM2.5) gridded datasets (Shen et al., 2024), spanning the years 1998 to 2022. This collection combines Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD)…
Jerónimo Luza Geospatial Data Scientist Education 2023-2024: Master of Science in Spatial Data Science, Penn State University. 2013-2018: Bachelor’s Degree in Economics, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella Publications “Shining a Light on Resilience: Estimating Economic and Electricity Service Recovery Paths in the Aftermath of a Hurricane Shock” (with Oscar Mitnik, Tomás Serebrisky, Lucia…