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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

By Guest PostMarch 26, 2013Technologybakersfield, bullet trains, cangzhou, China, environmental economist, hang lung center, high speed, los angeles, matthew kahn, megacities like beijing, palmdale, qinhuangdao, quality of life, rail system, second tier, second tier cities, shijiazhuang, siqi zheng, tsinghua university, ucla, water pollution, yangquan

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…)

NASA Radar Penetrates Thick, Thin of Gulf Oil Spill

By Guest PostOctober 27, 2012Environment3d, aircraft, aircraft operations, barataria bay, ben holt, bp, brent minchew, california, cathleen jones, coastline, corpus christi, data, deepwater horizon, disaster, dryden, earthquakes, environmental condition, environmental impact, environmental standpoint, facility, florida keys, forestry biomass, glaciers, gulf, gulf coast, gulfstream, imaging radar, institute, jet, laboratory, louisiana wetlands, marine, mechanical recovery, Mexico, millimeter, NASA, oil emulsion, oil slicks, oil spills, palmdale, pasadena, propulsion, radar imagery, radar system, remote sensing, seawater, sensitivity, shoreline, soil moisture, spill incidence, Technology, texas, uavsar, volcanoes

PASADENA, Calif. – Researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena have developed a method to use a specialized NASA 3-D imaging radar to characterize the oil in oil spills, such as the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The research can be used to improve response operations during future marine oil spills.

Caltech graduate student Brent Minchew and JPL researchers Cathleen Jones and Ben Holt analyzed NASA radar imagery collected over the main slick of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill on June 22 and June 23, 2010. The data were acquired by the JPL-developed Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR) during the first of its three deployments over the spill area between June 2010 and July 2012. The UAVSAR was carried in a pod mounted beneath a NASA C-20A piloted aircraft, a version of the Gulfstream III business jet, based at NASA’s Dryden Aircraft Operations Facility in Palmdale, Calif. The researchers demonstrated, for the first time, that a radar system like UAVSAR can be used to characterize the oil within a slick, distinguishing very thin films like oil sheen from more damaging thick oil emulsions. (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

NASA Radar Penetrates Thick, Thin of Gulf Oil Spill