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Measuring Changes in Vegetation and Land Surfaces by Remote Sensing

Vegetation and land surfaces in other Southwestern deserts

New methods to analyze images from satellite and NASA aircraft are used to characterize desert surfaces and vegetation that record responses of the land surface to changing climatic and land-use conditions. These methods are tied to on-ground measurement of soil conditions, plant distribution, and meteorology to develop models for understanding and, eventually, predicting landscape change, including locations and amounts of dust emission into the atmosphere.

Methods include: multi-spectral and multi-temporal satellite imagery, color infrared, thermal, multi-band radar, hyperspectral airborne data, remote digital photography.