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Year: 2015

News Archive

Tracking Global Surface Water Dynamics with Landsat

At #AGU15, Amy Hudson, from the University of Maryland College Park, presented a poster about her work to develop a global surface water dynamics map for the years 2000–2014 using data from three Landsat satellites. We spoke with her about this effort.

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Measuring Movement at the Bottom of the Earth

Alex Gardner, a Research Scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has used 30 years of Landsat data—some 3 million scenes—to measure the velocity of Antarctica’s ice sheet. He spoke with us about the work he is presenting at #AGU15.

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The Mechanics of Meander Migration

Joshua Ahmed from Cardiff University studies how river meanders evolve. Using Landsat data to examine river movement through time, his team has made new observations about river channel change. He presented his findings at #AGU15.

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Monitoring Small Surface Water Bodies in Africa

Naga Manohar Velpuri, works with the USGS Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET). The project has recently initiated a large-scale project to monitor surface water bodies in the pastoral regions of Africa using multi-source satellite data and hydrologic modeling techniques. Currently, a total of 293 water points are being monitored in 10 countries. Velpuri shared some of the projects findings he presented at #AGU15.

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Detecting Landslides in Nepal with Landsat

Justin Roberts-Pierel from the Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology, uses Landsat 8 to detect landslides in the Himalayas. He provided information about his studies at #AGU15. We talked with him about his work.

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Mapping Antarctic Rock Outcrops with Landsat 8

Alex Burton-Johnson, Martin Black, and Peter Fretwell from the British Antarctic Survey have used Landsat 8 data to create a new rock outcrop map for Antarctica, which will become part of the Antarctic Digital Database. The team presented their research at #AGU15.

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A New Landsat-based Snow Cover Product from USGS

David Selkowitz, a Research Geographer with the USGS Alaska Science Center, and his team have developed a snow cover product, that allows users to look at historical snow cover through time. Selkowitz presented a poster on the Landsat-based data product at #AGU15. Here’s what we learned from him this week.

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Longwall mining machinery in a Colorado coal mine

Assessing Longwall Mining Impacts on the Forests Above

Erin Pfeil-McCullough, a graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh, gave a talk at #AGU15 on insights that she has gained from her research to determine what impacts longwall mining has on forest canopies above as the ground subsides and local hydrology is altered.

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Landsat Helps Inform Restoration Decisions in the Great Lakes

Charles Perry, a Research Soil Scientist with the USDA’s Forest Inventory and Analysis group, gave a talk about his research that uses Landsat to monitor land use and land cover change in watersheds surrounding the Great Lakes at #AGU15. He is able to link the land use and land cover change information with other ancillary data to predict water quality, such as the amount of phosphorus (which feeds algae) in the lakes.

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Tractor going through fields

Landsat at the 2015 AGU Fall Meeting

At this year’s AGU Fall meeting over 325 presentations feature research done using Landsat data. The Landsat-related papers and posters run the gamut of disciplines from cryosphere to biogeoscience to hydrology to global environmental change to natural hazards to informatics.

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Case Studies in Carbon and Climate

Every part of the mosaic of Earth’s surface — ocean and land, Arctic and tropics, forest and grassland — absorbs and releases carbon in a different way. Wild-card events such as massive wildfires and drought complicate the global picture even more. To better predict future climate, we need to understand how Earth’s ecosystems will change as the climate warms and how extreme events will shape and interact with the future environment.

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Despite Warming, Landsat Reveals Decadal Slowdowns on Greenland Ice Sheet

Ice sheets are in perpetual motion, making their way downslope like a river. If the amount of snow that an ice sheet accumulates does not keep pace with its loss to the sea, sea level will rise. As temperatures have climbed, positive feedback loops have led to an accelerated loss of ice sheet sections that touch the sea, but in an unexpected twist to the global warming saga, scientists have just discovered a negative feedback loop that is slowing down the Greenland Ice Sheet sections that end on land—a sliver of good news for sea-level rise.

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1911 USGS map

Creating an Oasis in the Desert: Lake Havasu City, Arizona, 1911

Parker Dam was constructed on the California-Arizona border on the lower Colorado River during the 1930s, as part of a project to employ people during the Great Depression, to generate electricity, and to provide water that could be pumped into aqueducts for agricultural, industrial, and residential use in other parts of Arizona.

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Visualizing Data—Landsat at the World Economic Forum

The World Economic Forum has published a talk given by Illah Nourbakhsh, professor of robotics from Carnegie Mellon and Matthew Hansen, a remote sensing specialist at the University of Maryland, that demonstrates how visualizing big data can revolutionize the way we understand and imagine the world.

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The Chesapeake Bay in 661 Million Pixels

Imagine you’re flying 438 miles above the Earth taking pictures and collecting information of everything below. What do you see? Now imagine you’ve been doing this non-stop for over 40 years. Do you notice any change?

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An enhanced vegetation index from Landsat imagery

Tracking Agricultural Water Use on a Smartphone

This fall scientists at the University of Nebraska, with partners at Google Inc., the University of Idaho and the Desert Research Institute, introduced the latest evolution of METRIC technology—an application called EEFLUX, which will allow anyone in the world to produce field-scale maps of water consumption.

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