Applications of satellite-borne observations in precision agriculture (PA) are often limited due to the coarse spatial resolution of satellite imagery. This paper uses high-resolution airborne observations to increase the spatial resolution of satellite data for related applications in PA. A new variational downscaling scheme is presented that uses coincident aerial imagery products from "Aggie...

In perennial and natural vegetation systems, monitoring changes in vegetation over time is of fundamental interest for identifying and quantifying impacts of management and natural processes. Subtle changes in vegetation cover can be identified by calculating the trends of a vegetation density index over time. In this paper, we apply such an index-trends approach, which has been developed and a...

Planet Labs (“Planet”) operate the largest fleet of active nano-satellites in orbit, offering an unprecedented monitoring capacity of daily and global RGB image capture at 3–5 m resolution. However, limitations in spectral resolution and lack of accurate radiometric sensor calibration impact the utility of this rich information source. In this study, Planet’s RGB imagery was translated into a N...

An airborne campaign was performed during August, 2014 in an agricultural area in the Duero basin (Spain) in order to appraise the synergy between very different sources of Earth Observation imagery, and very different instruments for soil moisture retrieval. During the flight, an intensive field campaign comprising soil, plant and spectral measurements was carried out. An innovative sensor bas...

A scene-average automated cloud-cover assessment (ACCA) algorithm has been used for the Landsat-7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM ) mission since its launch by NASA in 1999. ACCA assists in scheduling and confirming the acquisition of global “cloud-free” imagery for the U.S. archive. This paper documents the operational ACCA algorithm and validates its performance to a standard error of 5 pe...

The Cerro Grande/Los Alamos forest fire devastated over 43,000 acres (17,500 ha) of forested land, and destroyed over 200 structures in the town of Los Alamos and the adjoining Los Alamos National Laboratory. The need to measure the continuing impact of the fire on the local environment has led to the application of a number of remote sensing technologies. During and after the fire, remote-sens...

This paper evaluates accuracies of selected image classification strategies, as applied to Landsat imagery to assess urban impervious surfaces by comparing them to reference data manually delineated from high-resolution aerial photos. Our goal is to identify the most effective methods for delineating urban impervious surfaces using Landsat imagery, thereby guiding applications for selecting cos...

Knowledge of the spatial distribution of crop types is important for many environmental and human health research studies. These studies may require crop type maps over large geographical regions for multiple years, which can be derived only from satellite images. Interpretation of Landsat images using traditional image classification techniques is not feasible for such applications because of ...

The successful launch and operation of Landsat-8 extends the remarkable 40-year acquisition of space-based land remote-sensing data. To respond quickly to emergency needs, real-time data are directly downlinked to 17 ground stations across the world on a routine basis. With a size of approximately 1 Gb per scene, however, the standard level-1 product provided by these stations is not able to se...