NASA - NASA Imaging Sensor Prepares for Western Wildfire Season

Hola amigos: A VUELO DE UN QUINDE EL BLOG., la Agencia Espacial NASA, nos alcanza la información de como la a tecnología de casi  imagimático sensor: The Autonomous Modular Sensor (AMS), aerotransportada desarrollada en la NASA:  NASA's Airborne Sciences Program, la ha  transferido al Departamento estadounidense del Servicio Forestal y la Agricultura (USFS) en 2012 está siendo probada para prepararse para la estación del verano que tantos problemas trae con los incendios de los bosques que en algunos casos se propaga como un  reguero de pólvora  en los Estados  Occidentales de los Estados Unidos de Norteamérica, los invito a leer la versión original en inglés brindada por la NASA.......

A natural color image of the slough mouth and salt ponds near Ames Research Center.

Subject: 

Data

WASHINGTON – Airborne imaging technology developed at NASA and transferred to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Forest Service (USFS) in 2012 is being tested to prepare for this year's wildfire season in the western United States.

The Autonomous Modular Sensor (AMS) is a scanning spectrometer designed to help detect hot-spots, active fires, and smoldering and post-fire conditions. Scientists at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., and USFS engineers installed it on a Cessna Citation aircraft that belongs to the Forest Service. The USFS plans to use it in operational fire imaging and measurement.

The western United States is expected to have continued droughts this year resulting in increased potential for fire outbreaks, according to the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) in Boise, Idaho. To help mitigate fire danger, NASA researchers and USFS firefighters are collaborating to improve fire management capabilities.

"NASA technologies in the fields of data communication, aircraft systems, advanced sensing systems and real-time information processing finally have coalesced into the operational use that supports national needs in wildfire management," said Vincent Ambrosia, principal investigator of the Wildfire Research and Applications Partnership project and a senior research scientist at Ames and California State University, Monterey Bay.

Developed by NASA's Airborne Sciences Program, the Autonomous Modular Sensor acquires high-resolution imagery of the Earth's features from its vantage point aboard research aircraft. The sensor transmits nearly real-time data to ground disaster management investigators for analysis.
The sensor has been modified to fly on various crewed and uncrewed platforms, including NASA's Ikhana remotely piloted aircraft, a Predator-B modified to conduct airborne research. Between 2006 and 2010 the AMS flew on the Ikhana and NASA's B-200 King Air to demonstrate sensor capabilities, support national and state emergency requests for wildfire data, and ensure its operational readiness.

Data gathered during those flights was used to develop and test algorithms for scientific programs that monitor changes in environmental conditions, assess global change and respond to natural disasters.


The Autonomous Modular Sensor will be operated daily over wildfires throughout the United States, providing an unprecedented amount of data to the fire research and applications communities. USFS also will use the sensor to support other agency objectives, such as vegetation inventory analysis and water and river mapping.

"I see tremendous opportunity for my agency and other land management agencies to benefit from the application of NASA-developed technology," said Everett Hinkley, national remote sensing program manager with USFS in Arlington, Va. "The AMS expands our current capabilities and offers efficiencies in a number of remote-sensing applications including fire, post-fire and forest health applications."

NASA will continue to support the Forest Service's use of the Autonomous Modular Sensor. Researchers with NASA and other agencies will have access to the data and can request mission use through partnerships.

For more information about Autonomous Modular Sensor, visit:

http://airbornescience.nasa.gov/instrument/AMS

For more information about NASA, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov

Best Conditions in the Area

› View larger
Plot of preliminary Airborne Topographic Mapper T4 wide scan data of Greenland’s Jakobshavn Glacier. Warmer colors indicate higher ice elevation and the transition from warm to cool colors shows the glaciers calving front, where ice breaks off of the glacier. The southernmost swath shows data from the Apr. 4 IceBridge flight and the two northernmost swaths show the Jakobshavn calving front six days later on Apr. 10. The difference between the two days shows a loss of about 200 meters of ice. Credit: NASA / ATM team

Scientists and engineers with Operation IceBridge continued their work on the 2013 Arctic campaign with a flight over glaciers in southeast Greenland and a return to the Jakobshavn glacier.

On the morning of Apr. 9 the weather report showed a rare combination of clear skies and low winds in southeast Greenland. A semi-permanent low pressure center between Greenland and Iceland, known as the Icelandic Low, often brings cloud cover into southeast Greenland that would interfere with IceBridge's laser altimeter and camera instruments. Clear days in the region are usually due to high winds pushing clouds away, causing severe turbulence that makes for rough survey flights.

After a transit flight across the ice sheet, researchers aboard the P-3B began surveys of the centerlines of glaciers not measured during previous IceBridge campaigns. Centerline surveys involve flying precise paths up and down glacier valleys while the aircraft's onboard instruments gather data on ice elevation and thickness and bedrock topography. Glacier runs usually mean a bumpy ride, but lower wind speeds caused only moderate turbulence. "Today we experienced the best conditions in the area in terms of turbulence," said Michael Studinger, IceBridge's project scientist.

The next day, Apr. 10, researchers took off for a return to the Jakobshavn, Rink and Kangerdlugssup glaciers. This mission, a repeat of similar flights from every previous IceBridge Arctic campaign aimed at completing a survey grid of the Jakobshavn basin with east-west lines, repeat surveys of other glaciers in the region and fly over an ICESat ground track.

With near perfect weather in the region, researchers had a clear view and smooth ride for collecting data. Returning to the Jakobshavn Glacier's calving front—the part of the glacier where ice breaks off into the fjord— meant that the Airborne Topographic Mapper team could compare their measurements with data from six days before. During the flight, the ATM team processed data that showed about 200 meters of ice had broken off of Jakobshavn Glacier between Apr. 4 and Apr. 10.

Favorable weather on both days meant that IceBridge collected a vast sum of data, and that researchers and visiting teachers had plenty of chances to learn from each other and take photos of scenery outside of the plane. During the flights, the team also communicated with elementary and middle school classrooms in Illinois, New Hampshire and California through Internet-based text chats, reaching 156 students and six teachers.

› Read about the IceBridge 2013 Arctic campaign.

Related News

Opposite Behaviors? Arctic Sea Ice Shrinks, Antarctic Grows

10.23.12

September 2012 witnessed two opposite records concerning sea ice. Two weeks after the Arctic Ocean's ice cap experienced an all-time summertime low for the satellite era (left), Antarctic sea ice reached a record winter maximum extent (right). But sea ice in the Arctic has melted at a much faster rate than it has expanded in the Southern Ocean, as can be seen in this image by comparing the 2012 sea ice levels with the yellow outline, which in the Arctic image represents average sea ice minimum extent from 1979 through 2010 and in the Antarctic image shows the median sea ice extent in September from 1979 to 2000. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio and NASA Earth Observatory/ Jesse Allen
› View Arctic larger,   › View Antarctic larger

The steady and dramatic decline in the sea ice cover of the Arctic Ocean over the last three decades has become a focus of media and public attention. At the opposite end of the Earth, however, something more complex is happening.

A new NASA study shows that from 1978 to 2010 the total extent of sea ice surrounding Antarctica in the Southern Ocean grew by roughly 6,600 square miles every year, an area larger than the state of Connecticut. And previous research by the same authors indicates that this rate of increase has recently accelerated, up from an average rate of almost 4,300 square miles per year from 1978 to 2006.

"There's been an overall increase in the sea ice cover in the Antarctic, which is the opposite of what is happening in the Arctic,” said lead author Claire Parkinson, a climate scientist with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. "However, this growth rate is not nearly as large as the decrease in the Arctic.”

The Earth’s poles have very different geographies. The Arctic Ocean is surrounded by North America, Greenland and Eurasia. These large landmasses trap most of the sea ice, which builds up and retreats with each yearly freeze-and-melt cycle. But a large fraction of the older, thicker Arctic sea ice has disappeared over the last three decades. The shrinking summer ice cover has exposed dark ocean water that absorbs sunlight and warms up, leading to more ice loss.

On the opposite side of the planet, Antarctica is a continent circled by open waters that let sea ice expand during the winter but also offer less shelter during the melt season. Most of the Southern Ocean’s frozen cover grows and retreats every year, leading to little perennial sea ice in Antarctica.

Using passive-microwave data from NASA's Nimbus 7 satellite and several Department of Defense meteorological satellites, Parkinson and colleague Don Cavalieri showed that sea ice changes were not uniform around Antarctica. Most of the growth from 1978 to 2010 occurred in the Ross Sea, which gained a little under 5,300 square miles of sea ice per year, with more modest increases in the Weddell Sea and Indian Ocean. At the same time, the region of the Bellingshausen and Amundsen Seas lost an average of about 3,200 square miles of ice every year.

› View larger The ice covering the Bellingshausen Sea, off the coast of Antarctica, as seen from a NASA Operation IceBridge flight on Oct. 13, 2012. Credit: NASA/Michael Studinger

Parkinson and Cavalieri said that the mixed pattern of ice growth and ice loss around the Southern Ocean could be due to changes in atmospheric circulation. Recent research points at the depleted ozone layer over Antarctica as a possible culprit. Ozone absorbs solar energy, so a lower concentration of this molecule can lead to a cooling of the stratosphere (the layer between six and 30 miles above the Earth's surface) over Antarctica. At the same time, the temperate latitudes have been warming, and the differential in temperatures has strengthened the circumpolar winds flowing over the Ross Ice Shelf.

"Winds off the Ross Ice Shelf are getting stronger and stronger, and that causes the sea ice to be pushed off the coast, which generates areas of open water, polynyas,” said Josefino Comiso, a senior scientist at NASA Goddard. "The larger the coastal polynya, the more ice it produces, because in polynyas the water is in direct contact with the very cold winter atmosphere and rapidly freezes.” As the wind keeps blowing, the ice expands further to the north.

This year's winter Antarctic sea ice maximum extent, reached two weeks after the Arctic Ocean's ice cap experienced an all-time summertime low, was a record high for the satellite era of 7.49 million square miles, about 193,000 square miles more than its average maximum extent for the last three decades.



The numbers for the southernmost ocean, however, pale in comparison with the rates at which the Arctic has been losing sea ice – the extent of the ice cover of the Arctic Ocean in September 2012 was 1.32 million square miles below the average September extent from 1979 to 2000. The lost ice area is equivalent to roughly two Alaskas.

Parkinson said that the fact that some areas of the Southern Ocean are cooling and producing more sea ice does not disprove a warming climate.

"Climate does not change uniformly: The Earth is very large and the expectation definitely would be that there would be different changes in different regions of the world,” Parkinson said. "That's true even if overall the system is warming.” Another recent NASA study showed that Antarctic sea ice slightly thinned from 2003 to 2008, but increases in the extent of the ice balanced the loss in thickness and led to an overall volume gain.

The new research, which used laser altimetry data from the Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat), was the first to estimate sea ice thickness for the entire Southern Ocean from space.

Records of Antarctic sea ice thickness are much patchier than those of the Arctic, due to the logistical challenges of taking regular measurements in the fierce and frigid waters around Antarctica. The field data collection is mostly limited to research icebreakers that generally only travel there during spring and summer – so the sole means to get large-scale thickness measurements is from space.

"We have a good handle of the extent of the Antarctic sea ice, but the thickness has been the missing piece to monitor the sea ice mass balance,” said Thorsten Markus, one of the authors of the study and Project Scientist for ICESat-2, a satellite mission designed to replace the now defunct ICESat. ICESat-2 is scheduled to launch in 2016. "The extent can be greater, but if the sea ice gets thinner, the volume could stay the same."

Maria-José Viñas
NASA's Earth Science News Team

 NASA

Guillermo Gonzalo Sánchez Achutegui

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