Mappers Gotta Map: Remote Sensing Style – Transcription

Danielle, you’re up next. Actually, unless Tyler’s here, I don’t think he could make it. Sorry, I should have mentioned that. Are you ready? Okay. Let me just open this up for you. Okay. Perfect. All right. Hi, my name is Danielle Golon. I’m the science communications specialist for NASA’s LP deck. We’re the land processes distributed archive. Long acronym. In Sioux Falls, South Dakota. And maybe you have been there. And we specifically distribute data about the earth’s land surface. If you’re in this room, you’re probably interested in geography or maybe civil engineering or understanding more about the place, whatever that means to you. Where you’re from or maybe where you’re currently at. There’s something that draws you to mapping. In the world of the LP deck, we tell stories from the sky above. They tell us how the physical land has changed, is changing or can help us predict how it might change in the future. And most importantly, the entire archive and available to mappers at no cost. So you can use this data to learn more about telling stories about important things happening on the earth’s land surface that are important to you. And these data are provided by a plethora of sources. So we have let’s see. So we have the SNPP NASA volunteers. And sensors. They provide daily coverage of the earth and close about larger areas so we can study the health of vegetation or impacts of urban heat islands during heat waves in the summer. We have the terra satellite sensor in terms of natural disasters, we can observe the earth closer and global elevation. Understanding how tall some of the tallest mountains are. And if you’re interested, I’ll talk about that tomorrow. And the community products, derived from one or more NASA missions. And then we have perhaps my favorite, our NASA measures products. These extend the life of previous missions, but they’re looking at the data in a unique, different way than it was originally created for. And we can learn about different types of crops on the earth or observe forests since the 1980s. So using the data we can look at the entire world or down to a 15meter resolution, which is a little bit more than a lower resolution than you are used to. But I’ll explain in a second. I’ll look at two examples in a local scale. This is Joplin, Missouri. In 2011 an EF5 hit Joplin with wind speeds of 325 kilometers or 200 miles per hour. It was on the ground for 30 minutes, 20 minutes longer than a normal tornado. It covered 22.1 miles. One of my close family friends lives there. So I spent a lot of my childhood during the summer growing up and visiting their family farm. It’s where my sister learned how to drive. And last year with the fifth anniversary of the storm, as a geographer, this was one of the locations I had to map and I wanted to learn what happened and how the city is doing. Using ASTRA data, we can look at it before the tornado hit. And two regions to pay attention to. The regional medical center and the local tech and high school. The ASTRA sensor was tasked to capture the area after the tornado. And it captured this image on May 30th. The ASTRA Satellite Center has to be told to turn on to capture data. It can sometimes capture the area before a different satellite does. And you can see the destruction from the tornado that damaged 30% of the city, including destroying the medical center, the high school and the tech center as I pointed out. The tornado caused about $2.8 billion worth of damage and claim would the lives of 158 people. With this nocost imagery, we can understand from above how large the tornado was, where it went and what areas needed help. And it’s useful during times of mapathons to help with these areas. We captured a cloud free view of the area a few months later with the scars visible. And five years later, ASTRA captured this image, the scar is visible, but it’s changed. And we can see the values for the city of Joplin at 250meter resolution. It provides a story of how healthy or green the vegetation in the area is. In the case of Joplin we can physically see the tornado scar and how the tornado affected the health that have vegetation. And this is the same time period of the summer but from this summer. We can see how some of the healthy vegetation was regained. What was previously lost in the tornado. There are still some bare spots. Some people got a map because it’s a fun hobby. I love finding interesting locations on the earth. Some people got a map to learn about the history of their town or develop their current town. And some people got a map to help rebuild after a natural disaster. But in the end, we all got to map. If you would like to use the data we distribute and have questions, reach out to our user services team or find me at the conference. If you use our data currently, talk to me. I love hearing about how people use our data. Thank you for your time. [ Applause ]