It’s a shame to read that Canadian climate research will likely continue to go unfunded, meaning the demise of the decade-old Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences. This research entity has been working on studies related to climate change such as the melting arctic, the consequence of permafrost thaw, and the pattern of drought in the praries. The Foundation has a mandate that runs through 2012, but it hasn’t received any funding since the Conservative government took charge in 2006. Without any funding, it will likely shutter its doors this year.

It’s concerning that science continues to be censored in areas of atmospheric research and global change. Assessing and understanding the trends and impacts of climate change should have no political bias, as the consequences affect everyone. Such a research network fosters larger science of an interdisciplinary and collaborative nature that follows no agenda and that cannot be swayed by politics. Perhaps it’s time for more of a global entity for research and science on this topic, taking advantage of the work of the Group on Earth Observations and facilitating coordinated global research efforts.

Researchers from Stanford and the University of California, Riverside are working to harness the power of accelerometers to build a seismic detecting network out of ordinary computers. Accelerometers detect movement and are increasingly being used in devices such as iPhones to flip from vertical to horizontal and Wii controllers. Many of today’s laptop computers already have accelerometers installed, and thanks to their high use they are a low-cost (under $50) item to add if the computer doesn’t have one.

The idea is to have a geographically distributed network of computers, and one or more computer in large buildings, that each send readings automatically to a central database. The amount of data that would be collected would far surpass what’s available today. The network is coming together now as the Quake Catchers Network, with more than a thousand computers already signed on.

Read more about this concept in this feature from the Los Angeles Times.

Canada’s 2010 Federal Budget was announced yesterday, including a five-year, $397 Million investment in the Canadian Space Agency’s RADARSAT Constellation Mission. This group of three satellites will provide complete coverage of Canada’s land and oceans with daily revisits as well as coverage of 95% of the world for international users. The satellites are planned for launch in 2014 and 2015.

A combination of aerial and terrestrial LIDAR are being used to monitor forests in the research work conducted by Monika Moskal, professor at the University of Washington and director of the Remote Sensing & Geospatial Analysis Laboratory. The detailed modeling of forests in the Pacific Northwest are being used for a variety of purposes, including the close study of the riparian forest/water interface and function for the suitability and sustainability of salmon habitat.

Moskal, spoke this week at the ILMF conference about the unique and well-suited contributions of LIDAR for forest study. She emphasized the repeatability of LIDAR measurements for ongoing observations that far exceeded the accuracy of field observation as well as the ability to observe large areas. The high-resolution forest modeling is proving superior for modeling Leaf Area Index or the roughness of the forest canopy as well as dbh for the size of tree trunks. Armed with this data, foresters can determine wood supply potential, forest fire potential, and better understand the forest/water intersection.

The ongoing study of the riparian areas extends beyond the suitability of habitat toward the ecosystem services of the forest for quality drinking water. Water is seen one of the leading potential marketplaces according to Ecosystem Marketplace, and in order to begin trading on the services that the forests provide for greater water quality, we will need to fine tune our means to model and monitor this valuable service.

Ken Hudnut of the U.S. Geological Survey discussed the use of LIDAR for both the Chilean and Haiti earthquakes at the ILMF event. Using the same scale, he showed the dramatic difference in size and shake pattern between these quakes. The Chilean fault size area was 60,000 sq km vs. 600 sq km in Haiti. He overlaid the PAGER product and combined with population centers, showing that the shaking patterns happened greatest in the densest areas in Haiti.

The Chilean earthquake was 500 times more energetic than in Haiti, although there were 300 times more deaths in Haiti, making it the sixth most lethal in recorded history. Given the level of deaths, the U.S. Geological Survey is studying Haiti in detail, with funding from USAID to understand what happened there, particularly since the global hazard map didn’t pinpoint the Haiti fault as a significant hazard area.

Construction, population density and strong shaking combined to make the Haiti quake the most fatal category 7 earthquake. The energy from the rupture of the Enriquillo fault largely went away from Port au Prince, making it less damaging than it could have been. The surface slip on the fault was mostly deep, without much surface faulting.

The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency has flow a system called ALIRT for LIDAR acquisition along the fault zone. The Rochester Institute of Technology/Kucera International flew a high-resolution collection project funded by the World Bank. LIDAR data has been shared via KMZ file through OpenTopography.org, and anyone can take a look.

The LIDAR and imagery combination provides a means to quantify land changes, and to assess in the field when different land changes occurred. Feature offsets give a sense of the slip rate along the fault over time. LIDAR is tremendously powerful for the assessment of offset features to understand where damage occurred in the past.

The USGS will be doing an overall hazard map of the area, and LIDAR has been very helpful to assess damage, understand coastal deformation issues, and has enabled the determination of the location of the fault in areas where it wouldn’t be detectable before.

The International LIDAR Mapping Forum kicks off today in Denver, with concurrent sessions on Data Acquisition and Coastal Zone and Bathymetric LIDAR. Tomorrow there are sessions on data fusion, current projects and technical developments. Friday includes a look at government initiatives, data processing and mobile mapping. There’s a good mix here of both practical application of the technology and talks focused on tackling technological hurdles.

Today includes several timely talks regarding the application of LIDAR for the response to the 2010 Haitian earthquake.

I look forward to delving into the details of these applications, and will file some reports later today from the show floor.

Programs to create detailed maps of marine areas that identify use by humans, habitat and natural resources, along with allocated space for fishing, recreation, shipping, oil and gas development and renewable energy production are on the rise.

The marine spatial plan gives communities the tools to define their environmental, economic and social goals to minimize conflicts among users and to maximize benefits. President Obama directed 22 U.S. federal agenices to develop a framework for effective coastal and marine spatial planning back in June and the number of programs are multiplying. The effort addresses both ocean coasts and Great Lakes resources.

There was a one-day symposium this past Saturday about marine spatial planning at this year’s annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Learn more about the AAAS symposium on the subject, including details on presenters, in this press release.

Today the Department of Interior launched the WaterSMART initiative with a press conference and geospatial presentation. The SMART part of the WaterSMART initiative stands for “Sustain and Manage America’s Resources for Tomorrow”. The president’s proposed budget includes $72.9 million for the WaterSMART program, which is a total increase of $36.4 million over 2010.

A big part of the WaterSMART is for the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Water Census, which will be conducted for the first time in 30 years. There will also be funds through the Bureau of Reclamation to study entire river basins.

The press presentation for this policy announcement took place in the Department of Interior’s high-tech operations center at their headquarters. The initiative was launched with a geospatial presentation on water supply and demand as a means of providing background regarding the need for such a program.

The new initiative gets a kickoff with a workshop that begins tomorrow with the seven Colorado River Basin States. Among the agenda items is a discussion of the anticipated 20% reduction in water flow due to climate change.

SEED Magazine has an in-depth story about resilience science and the contribution that its making to understanding and managing of our cities. Following is a description of resilience theory that points out the need to quantify and understand the natural states and the tipping points that put our systems at odds with livability and sustainability.

“Resilience theory, first introduced by Canadian ecologist C.S. “Buzz” Holling in 1973, begins with two radical premises. The first is that humans and nature are strongly coupled and co-evolving, and should therefore be conceived of as one “social-ecological” system. The second is that the long-held assumption that systems respond to change in a linear, predictable fashion is simply wrong. According to resilience thinking, systems are in constant flux; they are highly unpredictable and self-organizing, with feedbacks across time and space. In the jargon of theorists, they are complex adaptive systems, exhibiting the hallmarks of complexity.”

This feature is certainly worth a read for all of those that are involved in managing our urban systems and infrastructure. The feature states that there is no balance but constant flux that must be adapted to. It speaks to the need to monitor and manage with constant imbalance in mind. All the more reason to apply geospatial technologies and sensor networks for the constant monitoring and analysis of change.

The concept of Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) is really quite simple as it involves the capability to tune the wavelength, pulse width and frequency of laser light, bounce that light off objects, and capture returning light over time to measure X,Y, and Z dimensions as well as the returning light’s intensity. The technology has proven to be quite useful for capturing 3D terrain and features, and is being used extensively to map infrastructure and natural resources.

Since the technology’s first inception in the late 1960s, LIDAR has been applied to atmospheric studies of air quality, marine and hydrographic studies, for bathymetric studies and water quality issues, surveying and mapping, as well as positioning and guidance. The technology has been tweaked and fine tuned for each subsequent application area, lending improvements back to the technology development as a whole. While all of these applications and their insight have been impressive, we’re still just scratching the surface with the capabilities of this technology.

Intensity Returns

The ability to measure and classify different intensities of the light returns means that LIDAR can be tuned to capture and record a variety of different phenomenon, both visible and invisible. The intensity can be customised for atmospheric research to pick up different signatures from molecules to understand what elements are present in our air, and can do the same in water. The signatures of the elements can then be monitored to understand changes in the atmosphere and the makeup and changes in the composition of our water bodies.

Seeing what can’t be seen by the naked eye is a key application of this technology. Coupling measurements with composition also lends itself to detect environmental changes in terms of soil composition, as well as changes in vegetation. The technology is being applied to monitor variations in how soil is compacted from as far away as a kilometer and to detect how soils have been disturbed to understand if they are polluted. The technology is also being applied in forestry to assess the overall health of forests and to detect susceptibility of forest fires.

The number of applications for LIDAR sensing of various environmental change are nearly limitless. To date, a number of different LIDAR instruments have been developed to monitor specific phenomenon. There will come a time in the development of this technology where we’ll see a highly dynamic LIDAR sensor to measure a myriad of different intensity signatures to gather far more information about how our planet is constantly changing around us.

Fusing Other Sensors

The combination of high-resolution color images on both aerial and terrestrial applications of LIDAR have provided very interesting and quick captures of reality that can be rather easily deployed in models in order to represent a virtual reality. The applications of this technology are as diverse as informing engineering and design projects to incorporation in the entertainment and game industries to inform storytelling.

The addition of other sensor on the aerial platform such as hyperspectral or thermal imaging provides even greater sensing synergy to detect a myriad of environmental measurements. Hyperspectral imaging provides a means to add to the topographic information of the 3D scan with measurements that help identify the types of vegetation with a resolution that’s only available through the assessment of the various color bands of the image independently. Through the application of thermal sensors on active fires, fire managers can get a much better understanding of fire behavior on different fuel types, informing mitigation approaches.

Multi-sensor confirgurations are proving to be a very interesting technology for scientific and surveillance use. The types of sensors and various applications will continue to proliferate, and will be an important tool in our increasing interest to monitor and understand change on our planet.

The Proliferation of the Technology

Just as video cameras were once too expensive to mount and leave connected, so too will LIDAR sensors come down in price to proliferate in areas that need constant measurement. The idea of a LIDAR surveillance system isn’t too far fetched, with the ability to measure distance, motion and composition. A LIDAR system could be used for virtual fence creation, alerting a central system when encroaching object pass a certain distance threshold. The ability of LIDAR to measure and classify would provide a means to quickly understand the makeup of the objects and would send an alert based on certain profiled compositions, such as metals or other detectable elements such as explosives.

We now have constant measurement from space with LIDAR deployed on satellites. These instruments provide fairly regular measurements on a global scale that needs to be augmented with both aerial and terrestrial sensors in order to get a wide scale of measurements. With decreasing costs of components, and more capable systems, we’ll see a proliferation of LIDAR sensors that will greatly inform us.

With increasing speed of data classifcation and analysis, we’ll gain a much greater understanding of change. And with increasing overlap of sensors at various scales, we’ll be able to aggregate these different measurements for a much greater understanding of the whole from the region and country scale all the way down to millimeters of accuracy on the ground.

Overcoming Data Limitations

One of the biggest technological hurdles for greater LIDAR utility has been the issues faces with the amount of digital storage space that is required to house the measurements, and the computing power that is needed to visualize and analyze these returns. The rapidly dropping prices in computer storage and capacity is easing some of these burdens, and the advent of cloud computing is providing whole new ways to deal with the data and visualization limitations.

By harnessing large arrays of computers, analysts are much easily enabled to dive into the details of the data. The ability to store the large amounts of data on shared machines also eases some of the burden of storage management, and makes the data much more readily and speedily accessible.

With easier data storage, analysis and integration capabilities in the cloud, the burden of collection is eased in order to proliferate more sensors. With greater capacity to utilize the data, more of the data will be looked at, which will lead to whole new application areas.

The future of LIDAR is quite bright in a myriad of ways, because of the uniqueness of its sensing capability. In a time when we need more and better means to measure and analyze our world, LIDAR technology will certainly shine in the coming decades.

REFERENCES

• Proposed NASA LIDAR Surface Topography Mission [PDF background]
• Quantifying Structural Physical Habitat Attributes using LIDAR and Hyperspectral Imagery, Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, Volume 159, Dec. 2009
• Extracting Wildfire Characteristics Using Hyperspectral, LIDAR, and Thermal IR Remote Sensing Systems, Christos Koulas, Proceedings of the SPIE, Vol 7298, 2009