Have a happy Thanksgiving break! Continue working on individual projects; your instructor will be available for online consultation.

Nov. 11th is celebrated at ESU, as Emporia is the founding city for Veterans Day. Enjoy your holiday!

Processed color-infrared image of the front of Plumb Hall on the ESU campus. Bright pink indicates photosynthetically active "green" trees, bushes, and flowers. The sky was intentionally masked as neutral gray. Image © J.S. Aber.

Some students have experienced problems completing the photo layer for exercise 5. Make sure all necessary images and files are located in your designated working folder.

Also continue the RST Morro Bay, CA series: Part 8 through Part 11 and textbook chap. 9. Let your instructor know about potential individual projects.

At this point in the semester, students should begin thinking about possible topics for your individual projects. Contact your instructor with ideas.

See also reading assignment on RST Morro Bay, CA: Part 1 through Part 3. This is the beginning of a multi-part series.

Your instructor and his wife had an interesting time at the Tar Creek conference in Miami, Oklahoma last week. We had an opportunity to conduct blimp aerial photography at a passive treatment facility in neighboring Commerce. The series of ponds is designed to simulate wetlands with biological and chemical cleaning of contaminated water draining from old lead and zinc mines nearby. The treatment facility removes lead, zinc, cadnium, iron, and other heavy metals. Only a small amount of power is necessary to run aeration pumps; the power is provided by a solar panel and small wind turbine.

Super-wide angle vertical view taken from 500 feet height; note vehicles at upper left corner for scale. Inlet pool displays rusty orange color, upper left end of system. Outlet channel with clear water to lower right side. Image © J.S. Aber.

Note: Your instructor will be away from campus Sept. 22-24 attending a conference in Oklahoma--see Tar Creek. Kary Reznicek will supervise class sessions in the GSA lab.

Contribution from Mike Lewis: While downloading data for an area of interest at work I recently noticed a lot of quite irritating lines on the periphery of all of my data. I found an explanation from the Australian Government linked below. Turns out I was only pulling from post 2003 Landsat 7 data. See Landsat 7 SLC.

Contribution from Irene Nester: This is the link to the U.S. Forest Service Remote Sensing Applications Center MODIS Active Fire Mapping Program's wildfire map of California and Nevada--see fire mapping. The map is based on the most recent MODIS instrument data from the NASA Aqua and Terra satellites. It shows the overall extent of the burned areas and the areas that are actively burning. I have been using it over the last week to keep track of the spread of the Station fire in the mountains just north of Los Angeles, which is my local area. This is a MODIS image of the Station fire and smoke plume acquired on 28 August--go to fire image.

This happens some years when high pressure is persistent in the Rocky Mountains. Warm air is directed northward along the Pacific coast from California to Alaska, and cool air flows southward in the Great Plains. While Kansas has enjoyed an unusually mild summer, California is baking and burning.

So, is this a short-term anomaly or a trend? Last year at about this time, also record low temperatures were set in Kansas. For example, a record low was reached at Atchison on Sept. 9. The new mark of 42°F shattered the old Atchison record of 49°F set in 1966. In fact, Kansas summer weather has been relatively cool and wet for the past several years--the last really hot summer was 2000, when many record high temperatures were set.

These climatic fluctuations track closely with sunspot cycles. The last peak in sunspots was 2000-01. The current sunspot minimum has been significantly longer than usual, by at least 2-3 years, which may explain these climatic variations. See sunspot predication. Remote sensing methods are utilized to acquire primary climatic data, such as ocean sea-surface temperature, etc.

Our reading subject for this week is image processing--see RST GIS analysis and textbook chap. 3. Students should complete lab exercise 1 this week.

Note: Two open-access journals of interest for this course: Journal of Maps and Remote Sensing.

We begin exercise 1 this week based on a Landsat MSS scene from the Andes Mountains of Venezuela, so think tropical. Our reading includes Landsat introduction (only), RST Landsat multispectral scanner, as well as textbook chap. 2.

It appears the Landsat 5 incident was temporary. Meanwhile free Landsat image downloads have proven extremely popular--see Landsat headlines. This would be an excellent source for project datasets.

Fall picnic: physical sciences fall picnic will take place on Thursday, Sept. 3rd in Hammond Park (just west of campus). All geospatial analysis students are invited to attend--pick up tickets for $3 each in PS office.

Reminder: all students must fill out, sign, and return the student agreement form either electronically or in paper format.

Disturbing news about Landsat 5, which recently celebrated its 25th anniversary of collecting earth imagery. The venerable satellite lost power and spun out of control a few days ago. Stability and function seem to be restored, but imagery must be evaluated--see Landsat 5 status reports.

Note: all students must fill out, sign, and return the student agreement form either electronically or in paper format. On-campus students will do this at our first class meeting.

Your instructor had a productive summer, which involved kite and blimp aerial photography of wetland sites in Pennsylvania, Maine and Massachusetts--see latest additions at geospectra.net.

Distance-learning students must have access to Idrisi Taiga software, which is the primary image-processing software utilized for this course. Distance-learning students can obtain the "student starter" license for $95, upon proof of student status. Note: Idrisi is for PC computers; it does not run on "Mac" computers.

Beginning in August, students should consult this blog frequently for course activities, notes, announcements, and reminders. All students are expected to make regular contributions to the blog as part of your course participation. Send blog text and images to your instructor.