The first part is the lecture that will be taught October 19th. It will give you a general background of the meaning of ``remote sensing'' and will introduce you to the many uses of remote sensing data at both local and global scales.
The second part takes place during the laboratory period of October 19th. The purpose of this part of the module is to get ``hands-on'' experience in the ``ground-truthing'' process. We will be using an exotech radiometer to measure the reflectance values of different surfaces (such as leaves, grass, concrete...) in a fifteen meter plot. We will compare our measurements to those taken by a SPOT satellite of the same twenty meter plot. We will meet in Harshbarger 203 (the lab classroom).
The third part takes place during the laboratory period of October 26. This lab will focus on the use of satellite images to study areas of deforestation and desertification. We will use the data collected the week before to calculate NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) for our plot and compare this to the satellite's value. We also will study in detail images of southeastern Arizona and Brazil.
This third part of the module is where you, the students, can choose what you'd like to study!
In lecture on Thursday, October 19th, I will ask you to take out a note card at the end of the class period. On that note card you will write two things:
PLEASE, do not copy any of these figures or images without seeing me first! Some of this material is copy-righted!
(Text captions including the sources (human institutes and satellites) will be added soon!)
The ''Global NDVI'' and ''NDVI for Africa'' images listed above are very relevant to this lab. How does the southwestern U.S. compare to the Amazon River Basin of South America? Northern Africa?
In this lab we will study images of southeastern Arizona, Brazil, and the image of your choice from the list under Part 3 below. The lab handout will list the study questions for Arizona's and Brazil's images and the general questions for Part 3. Specific questions for each of the images in Part 3 will be in the "caption" to each image.
The following images are used in Parts 1 and 2 of Lab 9:
Part 3: Choose one of the images listed below to describe in an e-mail letter to your classmates. Be certain to look at the ``caption'' next to each image. The captions include summaries describing the images and list discussion questions. To get full credit for the lab assignment, you must answer the discussion questions listed in the captions and give the following information: 1) the ground location of the image, 2) the type of image (i.e. infrared or radar), 3) the purpose of the image (i.e. to study deforestation in the Amazon River Basin), 4) what you thought was the most interesting feature in the image, and 5) what you learned from the image that you would not have been able to learn if you had been standing on the ground (or swimming in the water!) and viewing the region through only your eyes rather than looking down at this region from a high altitude.
''Greeness of Australia'' videos. The videos of seasonal vegetation changes over Australia are located at the following address: http://kaos.erin.gov.au/sat_pics/ndvi.html. See Michelle for more explicit instructions if you are interested in exploring these images.
"Greeness of Australia" caption
