Earlier this year on Jan. 7, 2014, a giant in the world of Landsat applied science— Robert B. MacDonald—passed away. MacDonald was largely responsible for first envisioning and formulating how to use early Landsat data to estimate global crop production.
This 1977 NASA video series, “Landsat—Satellite for All Seasons,” provides examples of early Landsat applications.
It takes a lot of land to grow food for the world’s seven billion people. About a third of Earth’s terrestrial surface is used for agriculture. And about a third of that, in turn, is used to grow crops. Now, a new NASA-funded effort aims to map crop fields worldwide, identify what’s growing where, and determine whether it’s irrigated or fed by rain.
Speeding around the Earth at 16,800 mph (27,000 kph), two Landsat satellites are quietly, expertly watching and recording changes in Earth’s lands from space. They are gathering data for people to make maps–all kinds of wonderful maps–of our cities growing, rivers flooding, lava flowing from volcanic eruptions, forests expanding or shrinking, crops greening through the growing season, and even of evidence of pollution.
With unbiased Landsat imagery as evidence, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit affirmed an earlier jury-conviction of a northern California farmer found guilty on 16 counts of filing false federal crop insurance claims—scheming the government out of $410, 372.
[Source: Library of Congress] Dr. Martha Anderson, research scientist, USDA, talks about using images from the Landsat satellite program to monitor water use and drought
Every month, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Center for Climate Prediction has a drought briefing by teleconference to identify the latest drought areas
Source: Charles L. Walthall, USDA Agricultural Research Service Forum It’s ironic that just when Earth-monitoring satellites are needed more than ever to address the food and
Martha Anderson, a research scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, uses images from the Landsat satellite program to monitor water use and drought on
With the capability to provide valuable information about individual farm fields, vineyards, and orchards, NASA satellites soon will provide California growers in the San Joaquin
Landsat doesn’t measure water vapor directly, but evaporating and transpiring water takes energy, something Landsat does observe. If they knew how much energy was going into driving evapotranspiration, Morse and Allen could estimate how much water a particular field of crops had consumed on any particular day.
Contributor: Gretchen Cook-Anderson, NASA Earth Science News Team Noreen Thomas’ farm looks like a patchwork quilt. Fields change hue with the season and with the alternating
In the dry Western states, where irrigated agriculture accounts for 86% of all water consumption, the water-use (evapotranspiration or ET) information provided by METRIC is critical for arbitrating increasingly common water-resource conflicts.
In a study published in the Spanish Journal of Agricultural Research, Spanish researchers demonstrate that Landsat data can be used to locate vineyards and estimate
A new set of vegetation maps for five islands of the Caribbean Lesser Antilles, including Grenada, St. Kitts, Nevis, St. Eustatius and Barbados, appear in
Like most decisions, political and otherwise, having a thermal band on future Landsat missions is a matter of money. In order to show the intrinsic worth of a thermal band, water managers have attempted to quantify the monetary benefits of the improved water efficiency made possible with thermal data from Landsat.
Contributor: Laura Rocchio Year-to-year we expect the price of bread to remain relatively stable, but rarely do we realize the complex interactions and activities that
Contributor: Laura Rocchio Farming is a risky business. A farmer must deal with the precarious nature of the weather, the volatility of commodity prices, the
