Publications

The Landsat Earth observation approach introduced in 1972 created a new way of monitoring land cover and land use globally. The Landsat 7 mission, successfully launched on April 15, 1999, continues those observations and demonstrates significant progress in precise numerical radiometry, spectral differentiation, and seasonally repetitive monitoring. Substantial improvements in calibration procedur

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No abstract available.

The land cover classes developed under the coordination of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme Data and Information System (IGBP-DIS) have been analyzed for a study area that includes the Conterminous United States and portions of Mexico and Canada. The 1-km resolution data have been analyzed to produce a gridded data set that includes within each 20-km grid cell: 1) the three most dom

A 2-year feasibility study was conducted at the USGS EROS Data Center, South Dakota (43.733°N, 96.6167°W) to assess whether a four-band, ground-based, sun photometer could be used to discriminate sky types. The results indicate that unique spectral signatures do exist between sunny skies (including clear and hazy skies) and cirrus, and cirrostratus, altocumulus or fair-weather cumulus, and thin st

Landsat, with its wide swath and high resolution, fills an important mesoscale gap between atmospheric variations seen on a few kilometer scale by local surface instrumentation and the global view of coarser resolution satellites such as MODIS. In this important scale range, Landsat reveals radiative effects on the few hundred-meter scale of common photon mean-free-paths, typical of scattering in

Satellite land remotely sensed data are used by scientists and resource managers world-wide to study similar multidisciplinary earth science problems. Most of their information requirements can be met by a small number of satellite sensor types. Moderate-resolution resource satellites and low-resolution environmental satellites are the most prominent of these, and they are the focus of this paper.

Mosses and lichens are important components of boreal landscapes [Vitt et al., 1994; Bubier et al., 1997]. They affect plant productivity and belowground carbon sequestration and alter the surface runoff and energy balance. We report the use of multiresolution satellite data to map moss and lichens over the BOREAS region at a 10 m, 30 m, and 1 km scales. Our moss and lichen classification at the 1

Satellite imagery provides a mechanism for observing seasonal dynamics of the landscape that have implications for near real-time monitoring of agriculture, forest, and range resources. This study illustrates a technique for visualizing timely information on key events during the growing season (e.g., onset, peak, duration, and end of growing season), as well as the status of the current growing s

Many applications of geospatial data in coastal environments require knowledge of the nearshore topography and bathymetry. However, because existing topographic and bathymetric data have been collected independently for different purposes, it has been difficult to use them together at the land/water interface owing to differences in format, projection, resolution, accuracy, and datums. As a first

The US Geological Survey's (USGS) Earth Resources Observation Systems (EROS) Data Center (EDC) in Sioux Falls, SD, USA, is the primary national archive for land processes data and one of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Distributed Active Archive Centers (DAAC) for the Earth Observing System (EOS). One of EDC's functions as a DAAC is the archival and distribution of Moder

Spatially explicit identification of changes in ecological conditions over large areas is key to targeting and prioritizing areas for environmental protection and restoration by managers at watershed, basin, and regional scales. A critical limitation to this point has been the development of methods to conduct such broad-scale assessments. Field-based methods have proven to be too costly and too i