Publications

Using localized studies to understand how ecosystems recover can create uncertainty in recovery predictions across landscapes. Large archives of remote sensing data offer opportunities for quantifying the spatial and temporal factors influencing recovery at broad scales and predicting recovery. For example, energy production is a widespread and expanding land use among many semi-arid...

Evidence-based responses to climate change by society require operational and sustained information including biophysical indicator systems that provide up-to-date measures of trends and patterns against historical baselines. Two key components linking anthropogenic climate change to impacts on socio-ecological systems are the periodic inter- and intra-annual variations in physical...

Understanding precipitation extremes over Monsoon Asia is vital for water resource management and hazard mitigation, but there are many gaps and uncertainties in observations in this region. To better understand observational uncertainties, this study uses a high-resolution validation dataset to assess the consistency of the representation of annual daily precipitation maxima (Rx1day)...

Crop phenology represents an integrative indicator of climate change and plays a vital role in terrestrial carbon dynamics and sustainable agricultural development. However, spatiotemporal variations of crop phenology remain unclear at large scales. This knowledge gap has hindered our ability to realistically quantify the biogeochemical dynamics in agroecosystems, predict future climate...

Evapotranspiration (ET) is needed in a range of applications in hydrology, climatology, ecology, and agriculture. Remote sensing-based estimation is the only viable and economical method for ET estimation over large areas. The current Landsat satellites provide images every 16 days limiting the ability to capture biophysical changes affecting ET. Thus, we explored the potential...

Across the Central Valley of California, millions of wintering waterfowl rely on moist soil seed (MSS) plants that grow in managed seasonal wetlands as a critical source of food. Estimates of MSS plant production are used to set waterfowl habitat targets yet this information is not well known. We created the first Central Valley-wide time series maps of MSS plant distributions and...

There is an ever-increasing need to use accurate and consistent geometric ground reference in the processing of remotely sensed data products as it reduces the burden on the end-users to account for the differences between the data products from different missions. In this regard, United States Geological Survey (USGS) initiated an effort to harmonize the Landsat ground reference with...

There is an active debate regarding the influence that climate has on the risk of armed conflict, which stems from challenges in assembling unbiased datasets, competing hypotheses on the mechanisms of climate influence, and the difficulty of disentangling direct and indirect climate effects. We use gridded historical non-state conflict records, satellite data, and land surface models in...

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) changed the management and delivery of Landsat products to the public in its archive through the implementation of Collections. The Collections process ensures consistent data quality through time and across all the Landsat sensors with a few modifications to the metadata. The consistent data products from Collections are more conducive for applications...

We present a high-resolution daily temperature data set, CHIRTS-daily, which is derived by merging the monthly Climate Hazards center InfraRed Temperature with Stations climate record with daily temperatures from version 5 of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts Re-Analysis. We demonstrate that remotely sensed temperature estimates may more closely represent true...

In 1979, the Australian Government chose the city of Alice Springs to host a Landsat Ground Station because of its location in central Australia. This location enables satellite coverage of the entire Australian continent. Its antennas have played a key role in supporting international satellite programs over more than 40 years.

The Joint Agency Commercial Imagery Evaluation (JACIE) is a collaboration between five Federal agencies that are major users and producers of satellite land remote sensing data. In recent years, the JACIE group has observed ever-increasing numbers of remote sensing satellites being launched. This rapidly growing wave of new systems creates a need for a single reference for land remote...