Grant Wiseman Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada Week 3 provided 7 days of much needed sunshine allowing for a study-site-wide dry down of soils and a significant increase in crop growth. Field crews were able to collect vegetation samples twice and soil moisture measurements four times! For more information, visit the SMAP Notes from the Field […]
Active since 2006, Batu Tara continues to puff away. A thin volcanic plume streams northwest from the cloud-shrouded volcano. The Advanced Land Imager (ALI) aboard the Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite collected this natural-color image on June 21, 2012. NASA image By Jesse Allen and Robert Simmon using EO-1 ALI data.
Jacqueline Freeman Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada Here are some photos from my veg team. They were taken today and show just some of the activities we perform during a vegetation sampling day. The first image is of Saeid and myself measuring crop height and diameter and recording all of the info onto a field sheet. […]
Eni Njoku Jet Propulsion Laboratory We are finally looking at a dry spell weatherwise for the next several days. The forecast is for clear weather (started yesterday) that should last through the coming week. PALS and UAVSAR had flights yesterday and today. Tomorrow (Sunday) there will be no flights, and then we plan to fly […]
Congratulations to Alexandre Mathieu for being the first person to correctly identify our Satellite Puzzler from last week. We posted a full caption that explains the image in our Natural Hazards section yesterday, and it appeared at the top of our site as the Image of the Day on June 21st. The image above is a […]
Grant Wiseman Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada Field teams had another successful week despite the weather still not living up to Manitoba’s famous warm sunny summers. The question on everybody’s mind is not if it is going to rain tomorrow but when? Week 2 contained two full soil sample day efforts, four vegetation collection days, the […]
Tom Jackson USDA ARS Hydrology and Remote Sensing Laboratory Having been involved in many field campaigns, one of the things that is interesting to do while driving around to the various test sites is to look for “roadside attractions”. There are a number of websites for tracking these down. On Saturday my route, which covered […]
On June 16, 1962, The New Yorker began publishing a serialized version of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. Spring would eventually turn silent, Carson warned, because widespread pesticide use was killing so many birds that there might be none left to sing. The book provoked a strong reaction from the pesticide industry, but also led to […]
During the SMAPVEX12 campaign measurements are being made simultaneously by airborne remote sensing instruments (PALS and UAVSAR) and by in situ sampling of the field sites. Measurements of the vegetation/crop structure characteristics and attributes during the vegetation growth phases are an important part of the data collection. Crop structure measurements collected during the campaign […]
Aspen trees (deciduous forest) comprise more than 90% of the sampled SMAPVEX12 forest sites, with an understory layer of shrubs and grass. The dense shrubs make it difficult to access the sites, therefore the soil moisture and vegetation sampling schemes adopted for these sites are different from the cropland sites. A representative circular area […]
