Remote Sensing
Remote Sensing
Sensors mounted on satellites, planes, drones, and ground-based platforms monitor land cover regionally and globally. The Climate R&D Program uses a range of remotely sensed data (including satellite imagery, historical photographs, and land-surface feature maps) to document landscape change and drivers, improve projections of future change, and identify impacts on infrastructure and society.
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Spatial Modeling of Land Use, Climate, and Environmental Consequences
USGS scientists have a long tradition of providing high-quality, consistent, and relevant land-cover data for the United States, using our archive of current and historical remote sensing data. Scientists at USGS EROS are using their experience in mapping land cover and their knowledge of land-cover change processes to temporally extend these databases beyond the dates of available remote sensing...
USGS Benchmark Glacier Project
Scientists with the USGS Benchmark Glacier Project study the process and impacts of glacier change, including sea-level rise, water resources, environmental hazards and ecosystem links. At the core of this research are mass balance measurements at five glaciers in the United States. Since the 1960s, these glaciers have been studied using direct observations of glaciers and meteorology. The project...
Patterns in the Landscape – Analyses of Cause and Effect
Understanding the rates and causes of land-use/land-cover (LULC) change helps answer questions about what, where, how, and why the Earth’s surface is changing. Land-surface change results from human activities or natural processes like floods, droughts, and wildfires, and many of these change processes are observable in satellite imagery. The growing historical catalog of satellite images allows...
Snow and Avalanche Research
Snow scientists with the USGS are unraveling specific weather, climate, and snowpack factors that contribute to large magnitude avalanches in an effort to understand these events as both a hazard and a landscape–level disturbance. The Snow and Avalanche Project (SNAP) advances our understanding of avalanche-climate interactions and wet snow avalanches, and improves public safety through innovative...