Fire frequency, area burned, and severity: A quantitative approach to defining a normal fire year
J.A. Lutz, Carl H. Key, C.A. Kolden, J.T. Kane, Jan W. Van Wagtendonk
2011, Fire Ecology (7) 51-65
Fire frequency, area burned, and fire severity are important attributes of a fire regime, but few studies have quantified the interrelationships among them in evaluating a fire year. Although area burned is often used to summarize a fire season, burned area may not be well correlated with either the number...
Estimating aboveground forest biomass carbon and fire consumption in the U.S. Utah High Plateaus using data from the Forest Inventory and Analysis program, Landsat, and LANDFIRE
Xuexia Chen, Shuguang Liu, Zhiliang Zhu, James E. Vogelmann, Zhengpeng Li, Donald O. Ohlen
2011, Ecological Indicators (11) 140-148
The concentrations of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have been increasing and greatly affecting global climate and socio-economic systems. Actively growing forests are generally considered to be a major carbon sink, but forest wildfires lead to large releases of biomass carbon into the atmosphere. Aboveground forest biomass...
A self-trained classification technique for producing 30 m percent-water maps from Landsat data
Jennifer R. Rover, Bruce K. Wylie, Lei Ji
2010, International Journal of Remote Sensing (31) 2197-2203
Small bodies of water can be mapped with moderate-resolution satellite data using methods where water is mapped as subpixel fractions using field measurements or high-resolution images as training datasets. A new method, developed from a regression-tree technique, uses a 30 m Landsat image for training the regression tree that, in...
A procedure for radiometric recalibration of Landsat 5 TM reflective-band data
G. Chander, M.O. Haque, E. Micijevic, J. A. Barsi
2010, IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing (48) 556-574
From the Landsat program's inception in 1972 to the present, the Earth science user community has been benefiting from a historical record of remotely sensed data. The multispectral data from the Landsat 5 (L5) Thematic Mapper (TM) sensor provide the backbone for this extensive archive. Historically, the radiometric calibration procedure...
Remotely sensed imagery revealing the effects of hurricanes Gustav and Ike on coastal Louisiana
John A. Barras, John Brock, Robert A. Morton, Laurinda J. Travers
2010, Data Series 566
Hurricane Gustav, a category 2 storm with 170 kilometers per hour (km/h) winds, approached the Louisiana coast from the south-southeast, making landfall near Cocodrie, La., on September 1, 2008 (Beven and Kimberlain, 2009); Hurricane Ike, a category 2 storm with 175 km/h winds, approached the Texas coast from the southeast,...
Monitoring the long term stability of the IRS-P6 AWiFS sensor using the Sonoran and RVPN sites
Gyanesh Chander, Aparajithan Sampath, Amit Angal, Taeyoung Choi, Xiaoxiong Xiong
2010, Conference Paper, Proceedings of SPIE 7862, Earth observing missions and sensors: Development, implementation, and characterization
This paper focuses on radiometric and geometric assessment of the Indian Remote Sensing (IRS-P6) Advanced Wide Field Sensor (AWiFS) sensor using the Sonoran desert and Railroad Valley Playa, Nevada (RVPN) ground sites. Imageto- Image (I2I) accuracy and relative band-to-band (B2B) accuracy were measured. I2I accuracy of the AWiFS imagery was...
Postcard for Ride the Rockies 2010
D.R. Van Sistine
2010, General Information Product 107
2010 Ride The Rockies route on shaded-relief mosaic of USGS Landsat 7 satellite images, southwestern Colorado....
Using Landsat satellite data to support pesticide exposure assessment in California
Susan K. Maxwell, Matthew Airola, John R. Nuckols
2010, International Journal of Health Geographics (9)
Background The recent U.S. Geological Survey policy offering Landsat satellite data at no cost provides researchers new opportunities to explore relationships between environment and health. The purpose of this study was to examine the potential for using Landsat satellite data to support pesticide exposure assessment in California. Methods and Results We collected a...
Preliminary assessment of several parameters to measure and compare usefulness of the CEOS reference pseudo-invariant calibration sites
Gyanesh Chander, Amit Angal, Xiaoxiong Xiong, Dennis L. Helder, Nischal Mishra, Taeyoung Choi, Aisheng Wu
2010, Conference Paper, SPIE Proceedings Volume 7826
Test sites are central to any future quality assurance and quality control (QA/QC) strategy. The Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) Working Group for Calibration and Validation (WGCV) Infrared Visible Optical Sensors (IVOS) worked with collaborators around the world to establish a core set of CEOS-endorsed, globally distributed, reference standard...
Earth as art three
Water Resources Division, U.S. Geological Survey
2010, General Information Product 111
For most of us, deserts, mountains, river valleys, coastlines even dry lakebeds are relatively familiar features of the Earth's terrestrial environment. For earth scientists, they are the focus of considerable scientific research. Viewed from a unique and unconventional perspective, Earth's geographic attributes can also be a surprising source of awe-inspiring...
Coastal-change and glaciological map of the Ross Island area, Antarctica
Jane G. Ferrigno, Kevin M. Foley, Charles Swithinbank, Richard S. Williams Jr.
2010, IMAP 2600-I
Reduction in the area and volume of Earth?s two polar ice sheets is intricately linked to changes in global climate and to the resulting rise in sea level. Measurement of changes in area and mass balance of the Antarctic ice sheet was given a very high priority in recommendations by...
Land-cover change in the Ozark Highlands, 1973-2000
Krista A. Karstensen
2010, Open-File Report 2010-1198
Led by the Geographic Analysis and Monitoring Program of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in collaboration with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Land-Cover Trends Project was initiated in 1999 and aims to document the types, geographic distributions, and rates of...
Conifer health classification for Colorado, 2008
Christopher J. Cole, Suzanne M. Noble, Steven L. Blauer, Beverly A. Friesen, Stacy E. Curry, Mark A. Bauer
2010, Scientific Investigations Map 3103
Colorado has undergone substantial changes in forests due to urbanization, wildfires, insect-caused tree mortality, and other human and environmental factors. The U.S. Geological Survey Rocky Mountain Geographic Science Center evaluated and developed a methodology for applying remotely-sensed imagery for assessing conifer health in Colorado. Two classes were identified for the...
Glaciers of Asia
Richard S. Williams Jr., Jane G. Ferrigno
2010, Professional Paper 1386-F
This chapter is the ninth to be released in U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 1386, Satellite Image Atlas of Glaciers of the World, a series of 11 chapters. In each of the geographic area chapters, remotely sensed images, primarily from the Landsat 1, 2, and 3 series of spacecraft, are...
Use of EO-1 Hyperion data to calculate spectral band adjustment factors (SBAF) between the L7 ETM+ and Terra MODIS sensors
Gyanesh Chander, N. Mishra, Dennis L. Helder, David Aaron, T. Choi, A. Angal, X. Xiong
2010, Conference Paper, IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS), 2010 : 25 - 30 July 2010, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA
Different applications and technology developments in Earth observations necessarily require different spectral coverage. Thus, even for the spectral bands designed to look at the same region of the electromagnetic spectrum, the relative spectral responses (RSR) of different sensors may be different. In this study, spectral band adjustment factors (SBAF) are...
The use of the Sonoran Desert as a pseudo-invariant site for optical sensor cross-calibration and long-term stability monitoring
A. Angal, Gyanesh Chander, Taeyoung Choi, Aisheng Wu, Xiaoxiong Xiong
2010, Conference Paper, Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS), 2010 IEEE International
The Sonoran Desert is a large, flat, pseudo-invariant site near the United States-Mexico border. It is one of the largest and hottest deserts in North America, with an area of 311,000 square km. This site is particularly suitable for calibration purposes because of its high spatial and spectral uniformity and...
Operational calibration and validation of landsat data continuity mission (LDCM) sensors using the image assessment system (IAS)
Esad Micijevic, Ron Morfitt
2010, Conference Paper, Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS), 2010 IEEE International
Systematic characterization and calibration of the Landsat sensors and the assessment of image data quality are performed using the Image Assessment System (IAS). The IAS was first introduced as an element of the Landsat 7 (L7) Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) ground segment and recently extended to Landsat 4 (L4)...
A comparison of multi-spectral, multi-angular, and multi-temporal remote sensing datasets for fractional shrub canopy mapping in Arctic Alaska
David J. Selkowitz
2010, Remote Sensing of Environment (114) 1338-1352
Shrub cover appears to be increasing across many areas of the Arctic tundra biome, and increasing shrub cover in the Arctic has the potential to significantly impact global carbon budgets and the global climate system. For most of the Arctic, however, there is...
Using land-cover data to understand effects of agricultural and urban development on regional water quality
Krista A. Karstensen, Kelly L. Warner
2010, General Information Product 113
The Land-Cover Trends project is a collaborative effort between the Geographic Analysis and Monitoring Program of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to understand the rates, trends, causes, and consequences of contemporary land-use and land-cover change in...
Distribution of potential hydrothermally altered rocks in central Colorado derived from Landsat Thematic Mapper data: A geographic information system data set
Daniel H. Knepper
2010, Open-File Report 2010-1076
As part of the Central Colorado Mineral Resource Assessment Project, the digital image data for four Landsat Thematic Mapper scenes covering central Colorado between Wyoming and New Mexico were acquired and band ratios were calculated after masking pixels dominated by vegetation, snow, and terrain shadows. Ratio values were visually enhanced...
Landsat: A Global Land-Imaging Project
Rachel Headley
2010, Fact Sheet 2010-3026
Across nearly four decades since 1972, Landsat satellites continuously have acquired space-based images of the Earth's land surface, coastal shallows, and coral reefs. The Landsat Program, a joint effort of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), was established to routinely gather land imagery...
An overview of the Landsat Data Continuity Mission
James R Irons, John L. Dwyer
Sylvia S. Shen, Paul E. Lewis, editor(s)
2010, Conference Paper, Proceedings of SPIE 7695, algorithms and technologies for multispectral, hyperspectral, and ultraspectral imagery XVI
The Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) is the follow-on mission to Landsat 7 and will be the eighth mission in the Landsat series. The mission is in development via an interagency partnership between the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Department of Interior (DOI) / United States Geological...
U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center-Fiscal Year 2009 Annual Report
Janice S. Nelson
2010, Open-File Report 2010-1060
The Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center is a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) facility focused on providing science and imagery to better understand our Earth. As part of the USGS Geography Discipline, EROS contributes to the Land Remote Sensing (LRS) Program, the Geographic Analysis and Monitoring (GAM) Program, and...
eMODIS: A User-Friendly Data Source
Calli B. Jenkerson, Thomas Maiersperger, Gail Schmidt
2010, Open-File Report 2010-1055
The U.S. Geological Survey's (USGS) Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center is generating a suite of products called 'eMODIS' based on Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data acquired by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Earth Observing System (EOS). With a more frequent repeat cycle than Landsat and...
Multitemporal L- and C-Band synthetic aperture radar to highlight differences in water status among boreal forest and wetland systems in the Yukon Flats, Interior Alaska
Andrew W. Balser, Bruce K. Wylie
2010, Open-File Report 2010-1027
Tracking landscape-scale water status in high-latitude boreal systems is indispensable to understanding the fate of stored and sequestered carbon in a climate change scenario. Spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery provides critical information for water and moisture status in Alaskan boreal environments at the landscape scale. When combined with results...