Day 9-Catch up

Had meeting with the Remote Sensing expert from Oceanography and my advisor. We talked over what I had learned so far in the quarter and got some interesting new ideas about how to proceed.

The most interesting, and possibly viable, one was the use of Spectral Unmixing. This means taking the value of a pixel and then divide it up by its components since no pixel is really homogeneous, especially at a 30m resolution. I think this will work, if I can learn to do it.

I'm reading some articles on it right now. Lots of them deal with fire, which was where I had originally learned about it, but there are studies using this technique for almost any subject that uses Remote Sensing. I need to read a bit more to understand the particulars but if I can learn to use the program, and not calculate anything myself, I think this would be very useful.

Day 8--ECHO and other things

So after following some good advice first my adviser to e-mail someone, and then from that person's response to e-mail someone else, I have some confirmed information on how to obtain free ASTER data. I just need to sign up for an ECHO account which, is not as easy as it sounds. I attempted to follow the link I was given (https://api.echo.nasa.gov/pump/faces/register_pump.jsp) I could not actually sign up (the page was not available). I e-mailed back to inquire and will probably try again later.

It also seems possible that we will be able to obtain the data since we will only need a couple of bands and a few images, only the visible red and near infrared to calculate NDVI.

Also, I wanted to explore again the price of Landsat-5 Data and it still appears to be free. There is a quote on the main USGS website saying "The opening of the Landsat archive to free, web-based access is like giving a library card for the world's best library of Earth conditions to everyone in the world". So I assume I can download it for free over the internet.