ALBERT

Description: The Environmental Research Aircraft and Sensor Technology (ERAST) program is a NASA initiative that seeks to demonstrate the application of cost-effective aircraft and sensor technology to private commercial ventures. In 1997-98, a series of flight-demonstrations and image acquisition efforts were conducted over the Hawaiian Islands using a remotely-piloted solar- powered platform (Pathfinder) and a fixed-wing piloted aircraft (Navajo) equipped with a Kodak DCS450 CIR (color infrared) digital camera. As an ERAST Science Team Member, I defined a set of flight lines over the largest coffee plantation in Hawaii: the Kauai Coffee Company's 4,000 acre Koloa Estate. Past studies have demonstrated the applications of airborne digital imaging to agricultural management. Few studies have examined the usefulness of high resolution airborne multispectral imagery with 10 cm pixel sizes. The Kodak digital camera integrated with ERAST's Airborne Real Time Imaging System (ARTIS) which generated multiband CCD images consisting of 6 x 106 pixel elements. At the designated flight altitude of 1,000 feet over the coffee plantation, pixel size was 10 cm. The study involved the analysis of imagery acquired on 5 March 1998 for the detection of anomalous reflectance values and for the definition of spectral signatures as indicators of tree vigor and treatment effectiveness (e.g., drip irrigation; fertilizer application).

Description: This viewgraph presentation reviews NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS)'s analysis of spatial characterization resolution for Aerial Digital Imagery.

Description: Autonomous Visible to SWIR ground-based vicarious Cal/Val will be an essential Cal/Val component with such a large number of systems. Radiometrically calibrated spectroradiometers can improve confidence in current ground truth data through validation of radiometric modeling and validation or replacement of traditional sun photometer measurement. They also should enable significant reduction in deployed equipment such as equipment used in traditional sun photometer approaches. Simple, field-portable, white-light LED calibration source shows promise for visible range (420-750 nm). Prototype demonstrated 〈0.5% drift over 10-40 C temperature range. Additional complexity (more LEDs) will be necessary for extending spectral range into the NIR and SWIR. LED long lifetimes should produce at least several hundreds of hours or more of stability, minimizing the need for expensive calibrations and supporting long-duration field campaigns.

Description: The NASA PACE project, in conjunction with the IOCCG, EUMETSAT, and JAXA, have initiated an Aquatic Primary Productivity working group, with the aim to develop community consensus on multiple methods for measuring aquatic primary productivity used for satellite validation and model synthesis. A workshop to commence the working group efforts was held December 05-07, 2018 at the University Space Research Association headquarters in Columbia, MD U.S.A., bringing together 26 active researchers from 16 institutions. The group discussed the primary differences, nuances, scales, uncertainties, definitions, and best practices for measurements of primary productivity derived from in situ/on-deck/laboratory radio/stable isotope incubations, dissolved oxygen concentrations (from incubations or autonomous platforms such as floats or gliders), oxygen-argon ratios, triple oxygen isotope, natural fluorescence, and FRRF/ETR/kinetic analysis. These discussions highlighted the necessity to move the community forward towards the establishment of climate-quality primary productivity measurements that follow uniform protocols, which is imperative to ensure that existing and future measurements can be compared, assimilated, and their uncertainties determined for model development and validation. The specific deliverable resulting from of this activity will be a protocol document, published in coordination with the IOCCG. This presentation will discuss the findings of the meeting, and address future activities of the working group.

Description: On the afternoon of May 17th, 2016, a major landslide event caused at least 92 deaths, with 109 still missing*. The site was rated highly susceptible to landslides in a new global landslide susceptibility map. GPM precipitation data suggest that both antecedent and current rainfall as well as complex topography played a role in the slope failures.

Description: Remote sensing science contributes greatly to our understanding of the Earth's ecosystems and cultural landscapes. Almost all the natural and social sciences, including geography, rely heavily on remote sensing to provide quantitative, and indispensable spatial information. Many geographers have made significant contributions to remote sensing science since the 1970s, including the specification of advanced remote sensing systems, improvements in analog and digital image analysis, biophysical modeling, and terrain analysis. In fact, the Remote Sensing Specialty Group (RSSG) is one of the largest specialty groups within the AAG with over 500 members. Remote sensing in concert with a geographic information systems, offers much value to geography as both an incisive spatial-analytical tool and as a scholarly pursuit that adds to the body of geographic knowledge on the whole. The "power" of remote sensing as a research endeavor in geography lies in its capabilities for obtaining synoptic, near-real time data at many spatial and temporal scales, and in many regions of the electromagnetic spectrum - from microwave, to RADAR, to visible, and reflective and thermal infrared. In turn, these data present a vast compendium of information for assessing Earth attributes and characte6stics that are at the very core of geography. Here we revisit how remote sensing has become a fundamental and important tool for geographical research, and how with the advent of new and improved sensing systems to be launched in the near future, remote sensing will further advance geographical analysis in the approaching New Millennium.

Description: The Karnali highway (Figure 1) is the only major transportation link that connects the remote Karnali region to the provincial capital in Province 6 of Nepal. This area becomes inaccessible by roads during every rainy season due to landslides. Despite the known landslide frequency, there have been no systematic landslide inventories conducted along this highway to date. Recent advancements in remote-sensing technologies have significantly increased our ability to map landslides of various sizes rapidly with less in situ surveys or human interaction. Landslide susceptibility, hazard and risk studies require a complete landslide inventory, which might only be possible from very high-resolution (VHR) and high-resolution (HR) imagery. Recent launch of Sentinel-2 in 2015 has provided free access to HR imagery enabling landslide detection at finer scales then what was possible with previous open source satellite imagery obtained from Landsat and ASTER. Satellites providing VHR imagery are commercially owned, expensive and not freely available expect for when disasters charter is activated. NextView licensing agreement, a partnership between the US government and US commercial vendors provides access to VHR imagery to federal agencies in support of scientific research [1]. This partnership provides access to VHR imagery obtained from the DigitalGlobe (DG) constellation which enables mapping of small landslides (〈 100 m2). In this study, VHR imagery from DG and HR imagery from Sentinel-2 will be used to map landslides along the Karnali highway using a semi automatic method based on object-oriented analysis (OOA) to create most recent and up-to-date landslide inventory. The effectiveness of this remote sensing based landslide inventory to produce a susceptibility map and its predictive capacity will be tested.

Description: The Earth Satellite Corporation (EarthSat) has been providing orthorectified Landsat data to NASA.Also included are 5 degree by 6 degree mosaics for most of the planet. The Earth Science Applications Directorate developed a specialized viewer application to view and navigate these individual tiles. It is the intent of NASA to make this publicly available and useable through the distribution of the U.S. Digital Landsat Mosaic Product.

Description: This report describes results of the functional flight test conducted with the Positive Systems' ADAR 5500 sensor system (serial number 8, linear configuration) near Winslow, Arizona on June 30 and July 1, 1999. The in-flight test is one component of the NASA Scientific Data Purchase (SDP) Validation and Verification (V&V) process. It allows to measure characteristics of the entire sensor system affected by both performance of the sensor during a flight and post-flight image processing. The following characteristics were analyzed: changes of dark digital numbers (DN's), radiometric linearity, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), spatial resolution, and geolocation accuracy. The measured characteristics were compared with the image product specifications defined in the Positive Systems' SDP contract. Dependence of the dark DN's on several factors was analyzed, but no significant correlation was found. However, the observed changes in dark DN's were relatively small, which justifies usage of a constant value in the dark DN subtraction procedure during post-processing. Dependence of measured at-sensor, in-band radiance (in arbitrary units) on measured in-band ground reflectance is very well described by a linear function - The sensor fulfills the linearity requirement. Measured SNR values lower than the contract specifications, but accuracy of that test was possibly affected by non-uniformity of the employed gray-scale panels. The SNR values are generally sufficiently high for most applications. SNR can also be improved during standard flights by using longer exposure times. Full width at half maximum (FWHM) of an edge response derived line spread function was used as a measure of spatial resolution. FWHM was generally smaller than twice the ground sample distance (GSD), in agreement with the contract specifications. Accuracy of the geolocation information, which is provided for the particular images in a metadata file, was found to meet contract requirements as well.

Description: An overview of the Joint Agency Commercial Imagery Evalation (JACIE) team is presented. JACIE, composed of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA), and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), was formed to leverage government agencies' capabilities for the characterization of commercial remote sensing data. Each JACIE agency purchases, or plans to purchase, commercial imagery to support its research and applications. It is critical that the data be assessed for its accuracy and utility. Through JACIE, NASA, NIMA, and USGS jointly characterized image products from Space Imaging's IKONOS satellite. Each JACIE agency performed an aspect of the characterization based on its expertise. NASA and its university partners performed a system characterization focusing on radiometric calibration, geopositional accuracy, and spatial resolution assessment; NIMA performed image interpretability and feature extraction evaluations; and USGS assessed geopositional accuracy of several IKONOS products. The JACIE team purchased IKONOS imagery of several study sites to perform the assessments and presented results at an industry-government workshop. Future plans for JACIE include the characterization of DigitalGlobe's QuickBird-2 image products.