The conference started Monday at 1:00pm. The first speaker talked about how to commercialize remote sensing through leadership and good customer relations. He also gave his positive opinion on the future of remote sensing.
1:30pm
Bridging the Gap between Remote Sensing Research and User Communities: The Role of
Universities
Dr. Charles Hutchinson
Dr. Hutchinson discussed the current situation between remote sensing and the universities as a paradox. With the explosion of GIS and GPS, there seems to be little knowledge about remote sensing and the education community seems to have little interest. He thinks the role of the University is to be the bridge between science and students. He gave Education, Extension/ Service, and Research as the three mandates for the university. Our opportunities for advancing RS in the university system are many, four of which, he spoke about. He thinks that the universities must get involved with existing programs such as CRSP at SSC and Earth Applications at NASA HQ. The universities also have to be willing to plan programs with state and local government as well as looking outside of the usual channels such as USD of AGR, NOAA, USD of the Interior and others. The issues that the universities face are many. For education mandate, keeping pace with the technology is a large issue and in extension it is identifying potential users and understanding their needs. The problem with research is deciding the fine line where research ends and business begins. He believes an end to end partnership needs to be formed.
2:00pm
Earth Science Applications
Alex Tuyahav
There are three goals of the NASA Earth Science mission. The first goal is to expand scientific knowledge of the Earth System such as seasonal to inter-annual climate forecast, natural hazards, ozone and climate change. The second goal is to disseminate information about the Earth System and to develop an Earth Observing System. The last goal is to enable the productive use of ESE science and technology in the public and private sectors through developing and transferring advanced RS technology. The challenges are to identify and understand the practical operational Earth Science and applications data and info required of the public and private potential users in the community. There must be bridging between basic research and the practical user community. To reduce the risk in the user community there should be joint endeavors between NASA, universities and the commercial community. This will increase the number of users, return on investment, commercial involvement and relevance to taxpayers.
The following were the application themes that he had for RS: Food and fiber, Natural resources, Disaster management, Environmental quality, Urban and infrastructure, Human health and safety, and land use/ man cover.
The implementation approach, which should be taken, is to develop risk-sharing partnerships between end users, researchers and servers. Find non-NASA resources such as USDA, USDI, etc.
2:30pm
Extension systems and RS applications
Rodney Brown
He stated that you must link the university to the community through extension.
3:00pm
The Space Grant Geospatial Extension Specialist Program
Julius Dasch
He spoke about the EPSCoR program and how the 20 states involved must do NASA relevant research. EPSCoR can contribute to the RS community by granting fellowships geared to extension projects because of the direct relationship between EPSCoR and extension. The purpose of the SGGES program is to establish faculty positions at the universities and create ties to NASA. This program will bridge the gap between scientific expertise and users. This will also be a conduit for information and the eyes and ears of NASA in the state. The activities of this specialist will be to: provide expertise in geospacial technology, assist state needs in RS, facilitate RS applications research projects, participate in Space Grant research, education and outreach activities in the state and be the liaison with state organizations and communicate RS in the state. The areas of focus to date for the SGGES are precision agriculture, crop maps, noxious weed control, natural resource management, and economic & community development. The three pilot schools are Utah State University, University of Arizona, and Mississippi State University. The plans of the project are to assess the three pilots and use the lessons learned as a solicitation for year 2001. In order to extend to other states the program must provide excellent results in the pilot states.
4:45pm
Precision Farming Program: Space Grant Pilot Program in Alabama and Georgia
The Space Grant Precision Agriculture Team
Thermal infrared remote sensing on precision agriculture research showed high correlation between yield monitor plant health in the field and at harvest. The participants of the project were cross-disciplinary. The focus of this project was to include actual farmers and to give them relevant data sets. The project used Space Grant and EPSCoR funds. This project gave the opportunity to bring diverse disciplines together and to show students the cooperative effort between universities and NASA. This project also showed extension needs to build around the old paradigms and cannot knock down what is already there.
Tuesday
8:00am
Potential Uses of Remotely Sensed Soil Properties in Precision Farming
Dr. Rickman
The purpose of precision agriculture is to find and map differences between and within fields, which will make the farmer more profit. The fields are treated as uniform blocks. They have found that fields are heterogeneous on the scale of a few meters. They have also found that if you can measure temperature or the chance in temperature, those plants that are the coolest produce better yield. What are needed is better and cheaper thermal sensors with spatial resolution of 2 meters or better. Their results pointed to at least a 86% correlation between the remote sensing data done June 26th, 1998 and the corn yield in September 1998. What is gained from this data could be an estimation of crop yield months in advance of harvest. In addition, the soil content and characteristics can be determined from remote sensing so the farmer can manage the land better.
8:30am
Linking Remote Sensing to Town Hall
The state of Connecticut is leading the way in making remote sensing useful to the
local community. They are using remote sensing data to make suggestions on land use and
water quality. In local government there are challenges to the decision making process
including high turn over and legal issues. The use of technology will aid in decisions on
land use through the power of visualization.
Online: www.canr.uconn.edu
and www.resac.edu
10:30am
NASA EOSDIS and access to ESD
The key goals are to provide access to all NASA Earth Science Data and not just EOS. They want to take advantage of expertise and data holdings at several data centers and to be able to evolve with changing technology.
Major Functions:
DAAC (Distributed Active Archive Centers) have been in operation since 1994 and over 900 data sets are held and supported each day.
http://eos.nasa.gov/imswelcome
www.earth.nasa.gov
www.eos.nasa.gov/esdis
1:00pm
Potential Uses of Remotely Sensed Soil Properties in Precision Farming.
Remote sensing of soil for precision agriculture may facilitate in matching application rates, therefor increasing the farmer’s profits and increasing water quality. The many problems of how much fertilizer to apply and where can be helped through remote sensing. The researchers found that a correlation between yield and pH. Remote sensing was used to characterize the soil properties like lime, N, P, K, etc.
1:40pm
Spatial and Spectral High Resolution RS of cropland optical instrument
SE-590 (368-1114 nm)
The instrument has an infrared thermometer and surveillance camera. The L-band radar will
take data on soil moisture and the C-band radar will take canopy characteristics. This
instrument can be mounted on a plane or tractor.
2:40pm
Thermal Remote Sensing
Ecosystems attempt to develop to systematically increase their ability to degrade solar energy. Ecosystems develop structure and function degrades the quality of the incoming energy, therefor the efficiency increases. In the case of corn, the thermal band correlation is greater then 86%. The potential for this method of RS to the health and integrity of evaluating crops is apparent.
3:15pm
Urban Thermal Landscape
Project Atlanta is concerned with the phenomenon of urban sprawl. The increase of urban areas has caused a slash and burn mentality of forested areas. This decrease in trees and an increase in asphalt has elevated the regional temperatures of urban areas. From thermal RS data, one can see the apparent difference between city temperatures and rural temperatures, which are approximately 10 to 20 degrees. The benefits of this type of data are to apply the results to decrease heat absorption.
Break Out Session
University Role in Remote Sensing
The list below is a brainstorming of the challenges universities face when dealing with remote sensing.
Wednesday
8:00am
Sessions today are mainly companies and vendors trying to sell their software and maps. It did not seem to be of much interest for us. I did speak with Julian Dasch for a few minutes. I explained why I was at the conference and my future plans to go to MSFC later that week. I wanted to know if he could tell me of ways our state could become more competitive in EPSCoR. He gave me two pieces of information, which could be helpful. He first told me that narrowing our focus of projects of research counts toward the planning grant and secondly we need to find ways of including state and local government and stakeholders in our projects of research. The NASA scientists wanted to leave early from the conference. I wanted to leave so I would be driving with people I knew, so I left to go to Huntsville.
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