REMOTE SENSING
- Position: DEVELOP Participant
- Employer: NASA DEVELOP/SSAI/Space Systems, LLC
- Location: Laramie, WY
- Time: Sept. 2022 – March 2023
Remote sensing for earth sciences is something that has intrigued me ever since I first read about it during an undergrad project. Remotely sensed imagery can be used for a wide range of applications including wildfire, sea surface temperature, habitat monitoring, and agriculture. With all this potential, I was really driven to learn what applications it had in my field, what the limitations are, and how to analyze imagery.
Enter NASA DEVELOP, an internship program that takes people who want to learn remote sensing and puts them on a team to conduct a fast paced remote sensing project that addresses the needs of a real world project partner.
The project I worked on used satellite imagery to assess sources of suspended sediment along a section of the Shoshone River in Northwest Wyoming. Suspended sediment refers to the amount of soil particles per volume of water. While you can’t get a direct measure of this from a satellite image, the resulting increase in reflectance can be recorded in images and used to estimate the concentration. This project involved coding in Python to retrieve relative reflectance values from the images and determine a relationship between reluctance and turbidity. We were then able to look at what type of rain or snowmelt event would trigger erosion, and therefore high suspended sediment and identify which tributaries contributed large or frequent sediment plumes.
In all things there are tradeoffs. Remote sensing is incredibly useful but there are also plenty of limitations. Clouds, sand bars, shallow water, rocks, shadows, and ice were all capable of altering the reflectance and interfering with accurate measurements. Remote sensing also has temporal limitations– only one image is taken per day and conditions may change outside of this time. These limitations were balanced out by the benefits of being able to look at suspended sediment spatially, including locations that would be difficult to monitor on the ground.I love learning, it was really exciting to go in knowing remote sensing existed conceptually to then actually learning the skills to execute remote sensing projects. I also really enjoyed working on a research project with a lot of freedom to figure out how to accomplish the goals.
For more details, check out our informational poster, technical report, or presentation slides.