How Many Bits? Radiometric Resolution as a Factor in Obtaining Forestry Information with Remotely Sensed Measurments

In this study, Landsat 7 and IKONOS data were compared to determine if higher quantization is beneficial for forestry remote sensing. An industrial forestry site in central Virginia was chosen for analysis because of its large variation in standing biomass. Data were selected and processed so that the measurements were as comparable as possible to one another. The processing steps included spatial aggregation, pixel alignment, and calibration to planetary reflectance. Due to several aspects of study design and execution, the results are inconclusive. The registered data sets were found to differ by more than 1-2%, which is above the theoretical limits based on their radiometric resolutions. Lessons learned from this study are that to investigate radiometric resolutions, extreme care must be taken to understand the consequences of every data processing step and that all differences in the compared datasets cannot be overcome

Irrigation Requirement Estimation Using Vegetation Indices and Inverse Biophysical Modeling

We explore an inverse biophysical modeling process forced by satellite and climatological data to quantify irrigation requirements in semi-arid agricultural areas. We constrain the carbon and water cycles modeled under both equilibrium, balance between vegetation and climate, and non-equilibrium, water added through irrigation. We postulate that the degree to which irrigated dry lands vary from equilibrium climate conditions is related to the amount of irrigation. The amount of water required over and above precipitation is considered as an irrigation requirement. For July, results show that spray irrigation resulted in an additional amount of water of 1.3 mm per occurrence with a frequency of 24.6 hours. In contrast, the drip irrigation required only 0.6 mm every 45.6 hours or 46% of that simulated by the spray irrigation. The modeled estimates account for 87% of the total reported irrigation water use, when soil salinity is not important and 66% in saline lands

Faculty Recital

This is the program for the faculty recital featuring bassoonist and English horn player Charles Wesley, clarinetist Deborah Huggs, pianist George Keck, horn player James Danner, flutist Deborah Franks, bassoonist Shirley Crumley, and oboist Shannon Scott. This recital took place on March 27, 1975, in the Mabee Fine Arts Center Recital Hall

How Many Bits? Radiometric Resolution as a Factor in Obtaining Forest Information with Remotely Sensed Measurements

This viewgraph presentation reviews the findings of a study that asks is 8 bits enough to obtain forest information via remote sensing with radiometric resolution. It was concluded that while there were differences in the varying resolution datasets, there was no clear evidence that increasing the quantization above 8 bits was a benefit for forestry monitoring

Large Area Scene Selection Interface (LASSI). Methodology of Selecting Landsat Imagery for the Global Land Survey 2005

The Global Land Survey (GLS) 2005 is a cloud-free, orthorectified collection of Landsat imagery acquired during the 2004-2007 epoch intended to support global land-cover and ecological monitoring. Due to the numerous complexities in selecting imagery for the GLS2005, NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) sponsored the development of an automated scene selection tool, the Large Area Scene Selection Interface (LASSI), to aid in the selection of imagery for this data set. This innovative approach to scene selection applied a user-defined weighting system to various scene parameters: image cloud cover, image vegetation greenness, choice of sensor, and the ability of the Landsat 7 Scan Line Corrector (SLC)-off pair to completely fill image gaps, among others. The parameters considered in scene selection were weighted according to their relative importance to the data set, along with the algorithm's sensitivity to that weight. This paper describes the methodology and analysis that established the parameter weighting strategy, as well as the post-screening processes used in selecting the optimal data set for GLS2005

Information transport by sine-Gordon solitons in microtubules

We study the problem of information propagation in brain microtubules. After considering the propagation of electromagnetic waves in a fluid of permanent electric dipoles, the problem reduces to the sine-Gordon wave equation in one space and one time dimensions. The problem of propagation of information is thus set.Comment: 3 page

EO-1 Data Quality and Sensor Stability with Changing Orbital Precession at the End of a 16 Year Mission

The Earth Observing One (EO-1) satellite has completed 16 years of Earth observations in early 2017. What started as a technology mission to test various new advancements turned into a science and application mission that extended many years beyond the satellites planned life expectancy. EO-1s primary instruments are spectral imagers: Hyperion, the only civilian full spectrum spectrometer (430-2400 nm) in orbit; and the Advanced Land Imager (ALI), the prototype for Landsat-8s pushbroom imaging technology. Both Hyperion and ALI instruments have continued to perform well, but in February 2011 the satellite ran out of the fuel necessary to maintain orbit, which initiated a change in precession rate that led to increasingly earlier equatorial crossing times during its last five years. The change from EO-1s original orbit, when it was formation flying with Landsat-7 at a 10:01am equatorial overpass time, to earlier overpass times results in image acquisitions with increasing solar zenith angles (SZAs). In this study, we take several approaches to characterize data quality as SZAs increased. Our results show that for both EO-1 sensors, atmospherically corrected reflectance products are within 5 to 10 of mean pre-drift products. No marked trend in decreasing quality in ALI or Hyperion is apparent through 2016, and these data remain a high quality resource through the end of the mission

Genetic risk of progression to type 2 diabetes and response to intensive lifestyle or metformin in prediabetic women with and without a history of gestational diabetes mellitus.

OBJECTIVE The Diabetes Prevention Program (DPP) trial investigated rates of progression to diabetes among adults with prediabetes randomized to treatment with placebo, metformin, or intensive lifestyle intervention. Among women in the DPP, diabetes risk reduction with metformin was greater in women with prior gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) compared with women without GDM but with one or more previous live births. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS We asked if genetic variability could account for these differences by comparing β-cell function and genetic risk scores (GRS), calculated from 34 diabetes-associated loci, between women with and without histories of GDM. RESULTS β-Cell function was reduced in women with GDM. The GRS was positively associated with a history of GDM; however, the GRS did not predict progression to diabetes or modulate response to intervention. CONCLUSIONS These data suggest that a diabetes-associated GRS is associated with development of GDM and may characterize women at risk for development of diabetes due to β-cell dysfunction

Signal and System Approximation from General Measurements

In this paper we analyze the behavior of system approximation processes for stable linear time-invariant (LTI) systems and signals in the Paley-Wiener space PW_\pi^1. We consider approximation processes, where the input signal is not directly used to generate the system output, but instead a sequence of numbers is used that is generated from the input signal by measurement functionals. We consider classical sampling which corresponds to a pointwise evaluation of the signal, as well as several more general measurement functionals. We show that a stable system approximation is not possible for pointwise sampling, because there exist signals and systems such that the approximation process diverges. This remains true even with oversampling. However, if more general measurement functionals are considered, a stable approximation is possible if oversampling is used. Further, we show that without oversampling we have divergence for a large class of practically relevant measurement procedures.Comment: This paper will be published as part of the book "New Perspectives on Approximation and Sampling Theory - Festschrift in honor of Paul Butzer's 85th birthday" in the Applied and Numerical Harmonic Analysis Series, Birkhauser (Springer-Verlag). Parts of this work have been presented at the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing 2014 (ICASSP 2014