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NASA and the USGS, a Shared History in Remote Sensing

Season 1Apr 23, 2018

A conversation with Jim Brass, Bruce Coffland from NASA and Susan Benjamin USGS director of the Western Geographic Science Center. They discuss the shared history between NASA and the USGS in remote sensing.

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A conversation with Jim Brass, Bruce Coffland from NASA and Susan Benjamin USGS director of the Western Geographic Science Center. They discuss the shared history between NASA and the USGS in remote sensing.

Transcript:

Matthew Buffington: (Host) You’re listening to NASA in Silicon Valley episode 87. Today

We’re continuing our collaboration between NASA and the USGS the U.S. Geological Survey, with a series of podcast episodes highlighting our work together. In this episode, we go through the history between NASA and the USGS, including a period when the USGS was embedded with NASA’s Biospheric Sciences Branch. Our guests are Jim Brass, branch chief, research scientist in the Earth System Science Biospheric Science Branch at NASA Ames. We also have Bruce Coffland, who’s with the Earth Science division working on high resolution remote sensing at NASA Ames. But also, Susan Benjamin USGS director of the Western Geographic Science Center, who also worked on land use mapping from remotely sensed images. From Orbit to Core, both NASA and the USGS are taking in numerous data points to better understand our favorite planet.

So, without further ado, here is our conversation with Jim Brass, Susan Benjamin and Bruce Coffland.

Host: We always start off the podcast in the same way, where we want to know how you joined NASA, how you ended up in the Silicon Valley. Let’s just get to know each other a little bit better. Jim, why don’t you go for it? Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Jim: Minnesota winter.

Host: Nice.

Jim: February, 1979. It’s snowing. It’s cold. I get a call from NASA Ames to say, “We need someone in forestry that knows a little bit about satellites.” And I went, “Oh, I did that.” “Hey, do you want to come out for an interview?” Did I mention it was snowing, it was cold —?

Host: And Minnesota.

Jim: It was February in Minnesota. And so, a week later, I’m on a plane. I come out here, I do an interview, and about three weeks later I’m working at NASA Ames. And it was unbelievable. First, you get off the plane in San Francisco; it’s like 55 degrees. It’s not snowing. The leaves are out. It was just like, “Wow, I’m in heaven,” at this point. So, it’s been fun ever since. There is no doubt about that. That’s how I got started.

Host: What did you study? Where did you go to school?

Jim: University of Minnesota. I was in forestry and ecology and chemistry, and literally when I got my undergrad degree there weren’t any jobs in forestry. I always thought I wanted to be out in the woods, running around counting trees. It just didn’t happen.

So, my advisor said, “Hey, there’s this remote sensing thing going on. Why don’t you come back to grad school? You took the three courses. You got A’s in all those. You did really well. You could even teach one in grad school.” So, I went into grad school. I took a lot of courses. Went into engineering at the University of Minnesota; took some courses over there.

And that’s when the call came. I got my Master’s, I was working on a PhD, and then NASA called and I went, “Hmm. Let’s see. I could stay here and finish a PhD or go to California.” Out to California I went.

Host: I get a kick out of it, because typically you think of like forestry — you’re thinking the forestry service.

Jim: Absolutely.

Host: It may make a little bit more sense, like Susan being over in USGS, but tell us a little bit about your path and how you ended up over here.

Susan: My path and how I ended up here?

Host: Tell us about you, Susan.

Susan: Okay. I started going to college, and then decided I didn’t really want to go to college.

Host: Nice.

Susan: So, I dropped out after a year, and I ended up working for a temporary agency, and they sent me to work at a place called IAC, the Institute for Advanced Computation, which was the group that ran the ILLIAC IV supercomputer here at NASA Ames.

Host: Oh, wow.

Susan: And I worked at a variety of extremely menial jobs for a while, and one of the things that I eventually got to do was work with some people from USDA and help install a big software package on the ILLIAC and on the PDP-10s, and they call it Editor, that was used to analyze Landsat imagery. And I was starting to think about going back to college, and the guy who installed it had gone to the San Jose State geography department, a guy named Bill Newland.

Host: Okay.

Susan: And so, I checked them out, and I decided, “Well, I’ll go back to school. I’ll work part time.” And after a semester one of my professors said, “Are you interested in a part-time job? Because there are these guys who are working over at NASA Ames for USGS, and they could use some student help.” So, I went and interviewed and got a student position, and things took off from there.

Susan: So, I joined the USGS group, a small group that was attached to the branch that Jim was working for, which I don’t remember what it was called back then, but now it’s SGE.

Jim: Now it’s SGE.

Susan: And we did Landsat analysis of a wide variety of things and worked closely with both that branch and then what was the high altitudes mission branch that Bruce was attached to.

Host: And Bruce, tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you end up at NASA? How did you get involved with these crazy people over here?

Bruce: Well, I knew all these people that Susan just mentioned, Bill Newland, and Susan and quite a few other folks were on this USGS project. But I went to San Jose State as well, and I’d just gotten out of the Army, and G.I. Bill, and trying to build a resume, I guess you’d say. So, I went and got a Master’s in Geography, same department that Susan attended, and I had a mentor. I hope everyone else agrees with Dr. Dick Ellison.

And I was off taking some courses up in Reno for the Army, and I got a phone call that there was a job at NASA Ames. So, I came down and visited the High-Altitude Missions branch, and we’d already visited there several times just as a student group and talked to the manager, Bob Ekstrand. And after a few minutes he just said, “You’re hired.”

That group flew imaging systems. So, we had mapping cameras we put on the U2s, and C-130, other aircraft, and then it was our job to catalog all that and even do some analysis. And so that was where I got my start, and then I’ve moved on since.

The Airborne Science Program and our particular group, the sensor facility, builds and operates digital imaging systems that fly on the aircraft, and oftentimes prototypes to something will go on a satellite and/or they are used as calibration systems to underfly the satellites with their imaging system. They compare what we do with our instrument and the orbiting instrument and check that they agree, and what they’re getting.

And they can then sort of — we can calibrate our systems and then compare them to what’s going on on the satellite, and that helps to fine tune everything in terms of the data that they’re collecting from the satellite.

Host: And I had mentioned it before, before we started. As we’ve been doing a series of NASA and USGS stuff, I find fascinating the different layers of data. NASA, you automatically think of the satellites. Okay, that makes sense. But it’s gathering data on the Earth, but then you have the airborne sciences. So, let’s throw instruments on airplanes, where you’re not just waiting for an orbit; you can go in and get more data points. But then USGS is —

Susan: USGS is on the ground, digging things up, measuring, and tracing animals around—

Jim: But the U.S. Forest Service, USGS, you guys have been known to use our data for your research.

Host: It’s all the layers of that data. It gives you a more holistic or a bigger picture. I think the ongoing tagline we’ve been using is, “From the orbit to the core,” just covering the Earth to better understand it.

You guys obviously go way back. Why don’t we talk a little bit about this? How did you guys meet? What did you guys first start working on together?

Jim: USGS, I can say my career was built on USGS. And the excitement of coming out to California, especially Silicon Valley, at that point — because USGS was up in Menlo Park — and back in I’m going to say the mid- to late ’60s there was a geologist named Bill Pecora, who actually, in my opinion, came up with the idea for Landsat. NASA had put up weather satellites, and so we’re looking at the globe from sort of way out. And I think it was Bill that said, “You know, it’s important to look at the Earth, and we need more resolution, and so NASA, why don’t you start looking at coming up with a series of satellites to specifically look at the Earth?”

And I think it took him from the mid-’60s to, well, the launch of the first Landsat was 1972 to convince everyone, and of course line up funding to put up a series of satellites like Landsat that we still have up there. So, I can pin my whole career to using Landsat data to doing all kinds of stuff. And of course, you never stop with the satellite data; you sort of start there. But Bill and USGS made it happen.

And so, when I came here, there were a few USGS people literally embedded in the branch that I came to work with. It was like the best of all possible worlds. You had the local experts, the USGS folks; you had a bunch of NASA scientists working; you had Bruce Coffland and the aircraft program there. And so, you had it all.

And then Susan mentioned the ILLIAC IV. This was like the supercomputer in the U.S. at this point. What we’re able to do is collect satellite data, collect field data, put that together, and then run it, process it, on this huge computer. And so, we didn’t waste days waiting for a job to come back; we got it back in a couple of minutes. I think we were unique, I’ll say, at least in the U.S.

Susan: That was a real resource.

Jim: It was incredible.

Susan: We could crank stuff out that my colleagues at other sites could never go through. We could do things like put together a mosaic of 57 Landsat scenes over the Ogallala aquifer. And then we could do it again. We could do one year, and then we could do it five years later. And pull out all the information on where the irrigated agriculture is.

Jim: So, this partnership of USGS and NASA just worked fabulously. We did large projects. We weren’t doing single scenes. As Susan mentioned, 57 — we did the entire state of California. No one that point, in 1979-1980, would even think about doing a job that size. But we could do it, because we had all the capabilities.

And of course, again, the aircraft program provided us with the fieldwork, the validation of what we were mapping with the satellite data. So, it was incredible time. It was a busy time. We attracted a lot of high talent to Ames to work in this area. So, it built and built; the branch got bigger.

Unfortunately, at some point USGS went back to Menlo Park, and that was sort of a sad day in my opinion because here were our friends, our family, and the local experts heading back down to Menlo Park. But it was a fabulous time.

Host: I imagine there’s a lot to be said about that, where having that proximity to each other, seeing each other at lunch, walking through a hall — there’s a certain amount of distance that you get when you’re in separate facilities over there.

Jim:It was a team approach, and it was nice. I don’t know who had the great idea, “Let’s embed some USGS people in this branch at NASA Ames,” but it was a fabulous idea.

Susan: I was talking with Gail Thielen who was one of the leaders in our group about how things came about. And she thought that it was because the branch leadership, and I think it was under Al Stratton?

Bruce: Mm-hmm.

Susan: Recognized the need for people who knew land use, land cover mapping. And that was the Ellison connection, because that was always his bread and butter. So, people like Gail and Len Gaydos, who was the office chief, had worked so closely with Dick Ellison that they were known as land use land cover mappers, and they brought that expertise to the branch.

She mentioned the Pacific Northwest Project; was that going on when you were around?

Jim:Yes.

Susan: I guess Ethel Bauer was the lead on that?

Jim:Yeah, Ethel Bauer. We had really some engineers from other programs at Ames come into the branch, and I would say serve as very good project managers to keep sort of the folks that were doing either land use land cover, or I was doing forestry, were doing agriculture. One of the first ones was the PNW, Pacific Northwest Project. We were mapping timber up there.

And that was a big issue back then. A lot of the resource agencies in the states were going, “Where is all our timber? We have all these companies working out there, the states working out there, the Feds, U.S. Forest Service. How do we put our arms around this resource, and how do we manage our resource?” And at that point you had aerial photography, and it took a lot of aerial photography to cover the timbered lands in California. And now, all of a sudden, we had Landsat.

Host: Bruce, when you’re looking about airborne sciences, it also moves into airborne photography and different instrumentations to look at the ozone?

Bruce: Oh, very much so. Yes. We flew over the years with mapping cameras. We’re talking about high resolution, nine by nine images on film, and you roll it out on a light table and do your interpretation. And that facilitates, analyzing satellite data because it’s at a higher resolution.

So, over the years, we’ve flown all the national forests in California, a good part of Oregon, Washington, and even out farther East where you find forests, we’ve done a lot of work. I had one project for years out on the East Coast where the gypsy moth infestation was a big problem. We had this exotic camera system that at one time was used by the CIA, very high resolution. We’d fly these forests as the gypsy moth infestation was mounting, and then they could do an assessment of where the damage was and how to manage it.

And we had a full-fledged photo lab right here in Building 203, and I was very involved in managing that part of it, the aerial photography part of it. And it was quite an operation for a long, long time. Last time we flew film was in Costa Rica in 2005. So, we had some far-ranging projects as well.

And USGS was very involved in those two deployments, and 2003 and 2005 we had a colleague from USGS down there with us helping, and his skills come from photo interpretation. You know good old Larry Handley. So, I had a long talk with him yesterday.

Susan: Oh, good.

Bruce: Anyway, so we’re looking at finding ways to manage this archive. We’ve got a huge archive here in Building 144, and we’re trying to decide how to use it, how to save it, and so that was a whole other conversation. That archive is unknown to most people at Ames now. In our heyday, it was pretty well known. With Jim.

Susan: We used to make extensive use of that, especially the Alaska photos.

Bruce: Oh yeah, that was quite a project.

Susan: You can’t get your boots up there on the ground, everywhere on the north of Alaska.

Bruce: We were tasked with photographing the whole state of Alaska in nine by nine black and white film and nine by nine color infrared film. It took 10 years to do it, and it was an amazing project. And I guess there’s been talk about trying to do that again sometime, but the resources, the money isn’t there.

So that archive is here. And up in Alaska they’ve been using it, wearing it out. Wearing the emulsions off, to do interpretation and analysis.

Host: That’s funny. With my team, and we’ve been working on taking a lot of photo and video. I get a kick, because I get these references, because we have people who are specifically working on that photo archive and that video archive, because for us we want to have our own digital copies where anybody can grab it from anywhere in the world before we send these big boxes off to the National Archives where it sits in a big warehouse with the Ark of the Covenant.

Bruce: That’s kind of the case. Yeah. That may be where it’s all headed.

Host: We want to make it accessible so people can get it.

Jim: Bruce, how many frames of photography do we have?

Bruce: Oh, I’d have to ask Rose to count it up. Easily 750,000, close to a million frames of this mapping camera photography. It’s remarkable stuff.

Host: I get a kick out of this whole thing because I tend to think of — people think of an Earth Science division, or airborne thing. I think the connotation nowadays immediately moves to climate change, and it’s a critical, super important — but I think people also lose track of migration of animals, erosion, crop yields.

You mentioned gypsy flies. There’s so much other stuff. Real, practical, solid data that you need. How bad are the forest fires polluting the air that we breathe? Like right now. It’s so much bigger than people I think even realize.

Jim: Yeah. I think the disasters are a big one. I think when I first came here, Bruce’s group was flying fires with the high-altitude aircraft.

Bruce: Mount St. Helens.

Jim: Mount St. Helens.

Bruce: I came here in 1980, about six months after you got here, and I’d just started in August of ’80. And Mount St. Helens was May of ’80, and we were still dealing with Mount St. Helens imagery. Pretty remarkable.

A big role in the oil spill in the Gulf here. We had the U2 down there, flying cameras and instruments from JPL and doing an analysis of that, and the extent of the damage, especially along the shoreline and all the wetlands damage. And that’s Larry Handley again, our USGS colleague from the national wetlands research center in Lafayette, Louisiana. And he’s been one of our primary customers for years and years.

We’ve flown photography over the Gulf Coast and along the coast of Florida, the east coast, on behalf of Fish and Wildlife Service and Larry’s group, and they’re constantly assessing the extent of change, especially in the Gulf where a lot of wetlands have been lost. That’s our hurricane buffer that we’re disposing of. Larry could sit here and talk for hours about that. He recently retired, but he’s still very active.

Host: Tell me a little bit about some of the work that you guys are doing now. Susan is going to be coming on over and hanging out with us, moving from Menlo Park over?

Susan: My center does a wide variety of different kinds of projects. The things that are most prominent right now are things actually related to hazards. So, we’re part of a big USGS project called Haywired, where looking at a potential for a giant earthquake to occur on the Hayward Fault, which is overdue apparently.

Host: It’s of great interest to people —

Susan:Don’t quote me on that one. It might happen. So, if it might happen, then we should plan for it.

Host: Absolutely.

Susan: So, the seismologists are having a field day with the actual ground shaking, but what my group does is look at the consequences. How long is it going to be before you get your phone service back? How long is your gas going to be out? What bridges are likely to fail? And how do we communicate, and how do we plan for that?

Jim: So, Susan, you’re using remote sensing to do some of that.

Susan: We’re using remote sensing to do some of that. We’re using GIS to do a lot of that.

Host: What is GIS?

Susan: Geographic Information Systems. It’s digital map information, and then the tools to do spatial analysis and derive new maps, and derive new information out of that. So, if the earthquake causes fires to occur, which it might cause, how far are they away from the schools? How far are those fires away from hospitals? Things like that, kind of proximity analysis. We do a lot of that.

The other thing we do with regard to hazards is look at more sudden onset hazards like a tsunami, and work on evacuation routes for people. Working with state and local governments, look at who is living in hazard zones.

Host: Is some of it running simulations, like if it hits here this is how —?

Susan: Yes.

Host:Wow.

Susan: There’s a lot of simulation work. There’s a lot of general modeling work and a lot of GIS work.

Host: I think of all of us who live in the area and work in buildings that were from the Navy in the ’30s and ’40s, we care a lot about what’s going to happen.

Susan: Yeah. So, the local governments — the ABAG, Association of Bay Area Governments is very concerned about where all these structures are, and we help them map them and put them in a context for the hazard events.

Jim: And it was interesting; we were doing a fires research project after the large fires in Yellowstone in 1988, and we were looking at nitrates and phosphates coming out of these fires and trying to figure out how that’s related to fire behavior, intensity, how hot things burned. We spent a lot of time up in Yellowstone, and what I was amazed at was we needed water information. And where do you go? USGS.

They collect all of this information. It’s just amazing, how much work USGS does out there on the ground that you don’t see until you actually go looking for some of this. And it solved our problem. We needed to know water flow. We needed to know water quality. USGS. That’s where they are. And then working in a national park, and of course that doesn’t stop there. They go all over the West; in fact, all around the nation.

Susan: We work everywhere. Everywhere we can put a gauge in.

Jim: They do everything. So, it seems like every time we started a remote sensing project, when you wanted to look at some field data, what was going on on the ground, it was always, “Go talk to USGS: they’re probably out there making these measurements.” And those are huge for any kind of remote sensing.

Like Bruce’s aerial photography and the scanner data. It is sort of the investigation where you’re looking at little clues here and there, and that’s to me what remote sensing and GIS is all about, is putting together the package so you can answer a question.

Host: Awesome so, for folks who are listening, if you have any questions, comments for everybody, we are on social media @NASAAmes from all of our platforms. We use the hashtag NASASiliconValley.

Just as a plug, we are a NASA podcast but we are not the only NASA podcast. You can catch our friends who do “Houston, We Have a Podcast,” and also “Gravity Assist.” You can pick up all of those on whatever podcast app of your choice. You can also go to nasa.gov and find it all. Or if you have an iPhone or an Android, we have the NASA app, and you can head on over to video and audio and you can pick up all the podcasts there.

But thank you so much for coming, guys. This has been a lot of fun.

Bruce: Our pleasure.

Susan: Yeah. Thank you.

Jim: Thank you.

[END]