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April 2018

Five Tips and Strategies on How to Interpret a Satellite Image

What do you do when presented with a new satellite image? Here’s what the Earth Observatory team does to understand the view.

  1. Look for a scale
  2. Look for patterns, shapes, and textures
  3. Define the colors (including shadows)
  4. Find north
  5. Consider your prior knowledge

Question #2: READ TO ANSWER FOR MORE INFO ON THE FIVE TIPS: earthobservatory.nasa.gov

Question #3: Also search through NASA’s Earth Observatory (Images or Articles) and the Jefferson Grid Instagram account.

Aerial photography can be quite beautiful, as can satellite imagery. These are more than just pretty pictures; interpreting aerial photography and satellite imagery is not easy; here is a great article that gives an introduction on how to interpret satellite imagery. With a little training, satellite images become rich data sources (instead of some visually meaningless data).  Using Stratocam, you can explore and tag some of the amazing place on Earth. 

Tags: mapping, perspective, remote sensing, geospatial, unit 1 Geoprinciples.

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See the Strange, Beautiful Landscapes Revealed by Lasers

“Geospatial technologies unearth a world hidden beneath the lush forests of the Pacific Northwest.”

 

If you were to strip a forest of all its vegetation, what would you see? To find out, Washington state’s government is using airplanes equipped with LIDAR technology to scan the state’s heavily-forested ground. What’s being revealed beneath the trees is a spectacular and strange landscape of hidden geology. Old landslides, abandoned river channels, ancient lava flows, and the tracks of glaciers are suddenly visible in stark relief. Tracking the altitude and location of a plane with GPS while it scans the ground with LIDAR yields a highly precise digital elevation map of the Earth’s surface created out of the billions of laser pulses. By uncovering the debris from old landslides, LIDAR can show where future slides may occur.

 

Tags: geomorphology, remote sensing, geology, physical.

Source: news.nationalgeographic.com

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