Remote Sensing for Archeology

The past can aid our understanding of the consequences of land cover and land use changes for human societies and the sustainability of ecosystems. In this area USRA works with NASA researchers by performing primary acquisition, processing, and analysis of data from a wide variety of remote-sensing sources. In one project focus - the recently discovered Maya city of San Bartolo in northern Guatemala - a processing technique has been found that allows the discovery of ancient settlements using satellite data. USRA researchers will archive, maintain, and distribute datasets and derived products that cover not only portions of Central America but also South America and Southeast Asia, and produce a number of standardized data products (vegetation indices, moisture indices, topographic anaglyphs, etc.).

Air Quality Applications

In early 2007, USRA researchers completed a report on the role of land use and land cover data within air-quality management decision-support systems. This report, based on discussions with the major groups actively working in this area, outlined the limitations and opportunities for future research. Over the next three years USRA will use high-resolution land use data sets in air-quality models, and use NASA remote-sensing assets to specify dynamic surface-vegetation properties such as leaf-area index to improve the performance and validate the output of air-quality models.

Public Health Applications

USRA researchers on the NSSTC public health applications team is developing methods using NASA remote sensing data to monitor land surface temperature, pollutant concentrations, land use/land cover, and cloud cover that may relate to specific health outcomes such as asthma and other respiratory diseases, cardiovascular diseases, heat-related illnesses, and emotional/psychological conditions. USRA scientists collaborate with partners at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the University of Alabama – Birmingham School of Public Health to employ these methods to explore linkages between environmental hazards and public health issues. Researchers are creating a public health surveillance system, a bridge between health and the environment, which is designed to improve predictions in weather, climate, and natural hazards by enabling and facilitating the assimilation of Earth observations and prediction outputs into decision-support tools. Many chronic and infectious diseases are related to environmental conditions, and the goal of this work is to help determine how weather, climate, and other key environmental factors correlate with the occurrence of chronic and infectious diseases.

Agricultural Efficiency Applications

The EPA is mandated to regulate transgenic crops under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA) and has a need to monitor and minimize pest resistance in transgenic species. Monitoring requires a technique for rapidly discriminating pest-infested crops. USRA scientists are evaluating the extension of hyperspectral data from field-scale instruments to NASA's space-borne Hyperion and Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) instruments to detect pest infestation in corn in support of EPA's decision support mandate.