Publications

There has been growing interest in the use of reflectance spectroscopy as a rapid and inexpensive tool for soil characterization. In this study, we collected 95 soil samples from the Yellow River Delta of China to investigate the level of soil salinity in relation to soil spectra. Sample plots were selected based on a field investigation and the corresponding soil salinity classification...

Detailed analysis of C-band European Remote Sensing 1 and 2 (ERS-1/ERS-2) and Radarsat-1 interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) imagery was conducted to study water-level changes of coastal wetlands of southeastern Louisiana. Radar backscattering and InSAR coherence suggest that the dominant radar backscattering mechanism for swamp forest and saline marsh is double-bounce...

Accurate and reliable evapotranspiration (ET) datasets are crucial in regional water and energy balance studies. Due to the complex instrumentation requirements, actual ET values are generally estimated from reference ET values by adjustment factors using coefficients for water stress and vegetation conditions, commonly referred to as crop coefficients. Until recently, the modeling of...

The 19th-century agrarian landscape of New Jersey (NJ) and the surrounding region has been extensively transformed to the present-day land cover by urbanization, reforestation, and localized areas of deforestation. This study used a mesoscale atmospheric numerical model to investigate the sensitivity of the warm season climate of NJ to these land cover changes. Reconstructed 1880s-era...

Failure of the Scan Line Corrector (SLC) on the Landsat ETM+ sensor has had a major impact on many applications that rely on continuous medium resolution imagery to meet their objectives. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Cropland Data Layer (CDL) program uses Landsat imagery as the primary source of data to produce crop-specific maps for 20 states in the USA. A new...

Human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and gas, have caused a substantial increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere. This increase in atmospheric CO2 - from about 280 to more than 380 parts per million (ppm) over the last 250 years - is causing measurable global warming. Potential adverse impacts include sea-level rise...

Estimates of mean annual streamflow are needed for a variety of hydrologic assessments. Away from gage locations, regional regression equations that are a function of upstream area, precipitation, and temperature are commonly used. Geographic information systems technology has facilitated their use for projects, but traditional approaches using the polygon overlay operator have been too

Remote sensing techniques have been shown effective for large-scale damage surveys after a hazardous event in both near real-time or post-event analyses. The paper aims to compare accuracy of common imaging processing techniques to detect tornado damage tracks from Landsat TM data. We employed the direct change detection approach using two sets of images acquired before and after the...

Foliage obscured man-made targets detection and identification is of great interest to many applications. In this paper, the backscattered laser signals from a multiwavelength polarimetric lidar were used to detect a vehicle hidden inside a vegetated area. The polarimetric reflectance data from the lidar at two separate laser wavelengths at 1064 nm and 532 nm revealed distinct target

Airborne visible infrared imaging spectrometer (AVIRIS) images, collected over Sioux Falls, South Dakota, were used to quantify the effect of spectral response on different surface materials and to develop spectral "figures-of-merit" for spectral responses covering similar, but not identical spectral bands. In this simulation, AVIRIS images were converted to radiance, then spectrally...

A methodology for long-term radiometric cross-calibration between the Terra Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and Landsat 7 (L7) Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) sensors was developed. The approach involves calibration of near-simultaneous surface observations between 2000 and 2007. Fifty-seven cloud-free image pairs were carefully selected over the Libyan desert...

Remote sensing of a natural disaster's damage offers an exciting backup and/or alternative to traditional means of on-site damage assessment. Although necessary for complete assessment of damage areas, ground-based damage surveys conducted in the aftermath of natural hazard passage can sometimes be potentially complicated due to on-site difficulties (e.g., interaction with various...