PE&RS December 2002

Cover Image
This image shows rainfall data (in shades of red) acquired by NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite over New Mexico at around 0345 UTC on May 12, 2001. The background, draped over a shaded relief, is a 16-day (May 9-24) EVI composite (Enhanced Vegetation Index, in green and brown), derived from data acquired by MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) on board Terra, NASA's first Earth Observing System (EOS) satellite (http://modis.gsfc.nasa.gov/). TRMM carries five instruments, including the first space-borne Precipitation Radar (http://trmm.gsfc.nasa.gov). MODIS is a 36-channel, multispectral radiometer (0.6-14 mm). Shaded relief files are from EDAC (Earth Data Analysis Center), University of New Mexico (UNM).

TRMM and MODIS data have been converted from HDF and HDF-EOS, respectively, to GIS-compatible formats, as part of NASA's Goddard Earth Sciences Distributed Active Archive Center (GES DAAC) Remote Sensing Information Partnerships (RSIP). RSIP's goal is to provide participating institutions with easy and inexpensive access to NASA's satellite data (See http://eosdata.gsfc.nasa.gov/DAAC_DOCS/Newsletter/Prior/gs2_3-4.pdf and http://eosdata.gsfc.nasa.gov/DAAC_DOCS/Newsletter/Prior/gs3_3.pdf). UNM EDAC is the first RSIP. The cover image shows how the RSIP network and its interoperability tools (e.g., http://daac.gsfc.nasa.gov/WEBGIS/) can enable the remote access to, and visualization and analysis of, distributed data. (For further information, see http://edacesip.unm.edu and http://daac.gsfc.nasa.gov/DAAC_DOCS/.)

Highlight Article

1230 Product Definitions and Guidelines for use in Specifying Lidar Deliverables
Martin Flood

Peer-Reviewed Articles (Click the linked titles to see the full abstract)

1257 Aerial Photography at the Agricultural Adjustment Administration: Acreage Controls, Conservation Benefits, and Overhead Surveillance in the 1930s
Mark Monmonier

From its initial goal of promoting compliance, the Agriculture Department's aerial photography program became a tool for conservation and land planning as well as an instrument of fair and accurate measurement.

1263 Incorporating Surface Emissivity into a Thermal Atmospheric Correction
Nathaniel A. Brunsell and Robert R. Gillies

How to estimate a pixel emissivity based upon a vegetation index and how to incorporate the effects of emissivity into a thermal atmospheric correction of AVHRR band 4 are described.

1271 Supervised and Unsupervised Spectral Angle Classifiers
Youngsinn Sohn and N. Sanjay Rebello

The cosine of the angle q (the spectral angle) can be utilized as a metric for measuring distances in feature space for multispectral image classification and clustering.

1283 Urban Growth Detection Using Texture Analysis on Merged Landsat TM and SPOT-P Data
Renee Gluch

A two-step texture analysis using digitally merged TM and SPOT-P data produces a binary "built/non-built" image identifying urban growth.

1289 Radar and Optical Data Comparison/Integration for Urban Delineation: A Case Study
Barry N. Haack, Elizabeth K. Solomon, Matthew A. Bechdol, and Nathaniel D. Herold

Radar-derived measures such as texture provided better classification accuracies than did optical data.

1297 Classifying and Mapping General Coral-Reef Structure Using Ikonos Data
Jill Maeder, Sunil Narumalani, Donald C. Rundquist, Richard L. Perk, John Schalles, Kevin Hutchins, and Jennifer Keck

Ikonos data were useful for discriminating sand, coral reef (at two depth intervals), and seagrass features, providing overall accuracies of 89 percent each for the two study areas.

1307 Creation of Digital Terrain Models Using an Adaptive Lidar Vegetation Point Removal Process
George T. Raber, John R. Jensen, Steven R. Schill, and Karen Schuckman

A method for the automatic extraction of land-cover thematic information directly from lidar data and the use of this information in an adaptive point removal process to extract more accurate bald-earth digital elevation models from lidar data is presented.

2002 PE&RS Indices
1316 Subject Index (Adobe Acrobat 118kb)
1338 Author Index (Adobe Acrobat 52kb)

Announcements
1280 Call for Papers - Advances in Systems for Spatial Data Processing, Analysis and Representation
1281 ASPRS 2003 Annual Conference

Columns & Updates
1237 Grids & Datums - The Hellenic Republic
1239 Book Review
1243 Headquarters News
1247 Industry News

Departments
1245 New Member List
1251 Calendar
1252 Who's Who in ASPRS
1253 Sustaining Members
1256 Advertiser Index
1262 Instructions to Authors
1270 Forthcoming Articles
1347 Classifieds
1348 Bookstore
1352 Professional Directory
1355 Membership Application

Top

Home