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NASA’s HyspIRI Sees the Forest for the Trees and More

By Guest PostApril 28, 2013Environment, Scienceairborne campaign, algal blooms, aviris, california, droughts, dryden aircraft, dynamics, ecosystems, environmental changes, er 2, forest, high altitude aircraft, hyperspectral infrared imager, hyspiri, imaging spectroscopy, methane emissions, NASA, operations facility, palmdale, petya campbell, quantitative assessments, robert green, season, simon hook, stephen ungar, surface of earth, surface phenomena, tree, volcanoes, wildfires

To Robert Green, light contains more than meets the eye: it contains fingerprints of materials that can be detected by sensors that capture the unique set of reflected wavelengths. Scientists have used the technique, called imaging spectroscopy, to learn about water on the moon, minerals on Mars and the composition of exoplanets. Green’s favorite place to apply the technique, however, is right here on the chemically rich Earth, which is just what he and colleagues achieved this spring during NASA’s Hyperspectral Infrared Imager (HyspIRI) airborne campaign.

“We have ideas about what makes up Earth’s ecosystems and how they function,” said Green, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., who is principal investigator of the campaign’s Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) instrument. “But a comprehensive understanding requires us to directly measure these things and how they change over landscapes and from season to season.” (more…)

High-speed rail study finds that remote cities benefit from connection to global hubs

Bullet trains fuel real-estate booms, improve quality of life and create other unintended consequences by sharply reducing commute times from smaller cities to large megacities, economists from UCLA and China’s Tsinghua University observed in a new study in China. A similar dynamic, they said, could play out as California builds its own high-speed rail system.

Because high-speed rail effectively brings cities closer together by reducing travel times, it allows people to enjoy many of the benefits of big cities while living in “second-tier” cities far from the pollution and congestion. By making second-tier cities attractive to those who would otherwise flock to global hubs, bullet trains could act as a safety valve for crowded megacities in the developing world and ease the effects of overpopulation, the study authors report. (more…)

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NASA’s HyspIRI Sees the Forest for the Trees and More

High-speed rail study finds that remote cities benefit from connection to global hubs