PubTalk-05/2022 - Using Military Remote Sensing Technology to Support Federal Civil Agency Science

hello and welcome to the united states geological surveys public lecture series thank you for joining us this evening at our new start time of 6 pm pacific time we hope you will this will give our central and eastern states viewers a better opportunity to join us my name is mitch adelson and i will be your host and moderator today before i introduce our speaker i just have a few announcements to make and this will allow others out there in virtual land a few extra minutes to get logged in first i'd like to give you a heads up about our lecture for next month on june 30th we will have michelle coombs scientists in charge the alaska volcano observatory talk about keeping tabs on the volcanoes of the last front here so please be sure to save the date and join us next month as well at the end of the lecture i will provide information on how you can join our mailing list so you'll always be in the know on these upcoming elections on these upcoming lectures and next we want to take a few seconds to give you some tips on a few features of this team's platform if you are watching this from a desktop computer and need to turn on closed captioning please look at the bottom right hand corner of the screen for the closed caption icon that's the one with the two little c's another feature we want to direct your attention to is the question and answer panel which can be opened by clicking on the question mark icon in the upper right hand corner of your screen at the end of the lecture you will have a q a session and this is the panel where you can submit your questions to our speaker please understand we may not have time to answer all the questions but we will do our best and appreciate your understanding in advance and now it is time to begin our lecture for this evening tonight we have the pleasure of welcoming paul m young director of the usgs national civil application center for the last five and a half years paul has served as director of the national usgs national civil application center which analyzes military and intelligence remote sensing data in support of u.s giant gs science missions paul started his career with usgs over 30 years ago as a cartographer compiling usgs topographic maps since then he served as a physicians overseeing systems development information management policy and earth and natural resource research and assessments so without further ado let's all give a warm virtual welcome to paul paul the floor is all yours okay mitch thank you very much for that introduction and thank you to amelia uh for you your help as well uh mitch just wanted to do a quick slide check can you see my title slide yes oh okay i got ahead to nod thank you alrighty all right let's uh dive in uh i organized this talk um or this presentation around my title i i have a rather long wordy title so let's uh break it down and this will serve as a bit of an outline uh for tonight's presentation so first of all i'm gonna uh answer the question what do i mean by sunk cost well spent with within the the context of this uh topic and then next i'm going to uh uh to answer what is remote sensing now if you have been to other usgs public lectures you you perhaps have come across uh remote sensing or other presentations that mentioned it but i wanted to make sure that everybody was up to speed on that topic and then third a story i really like to tell and that is how the u.s geological survey a civilian agency uh came to partner uh with the military and the intelligence community and then next is how have we benefited from that partnership and the main part of my uh briefing tonight is is how are we using uh remote sensing technology from the military and intelligence community uh to advance usgs and other federal science munitions i'll also direct your attention i've got two pictures of the statue of liberty here and the one in the lower right you'll see again in a couple of minutes so just keep that image in mind because it's going to come the bed back up okay so what do we mean by sunk cost well spent well um investments in earth observing technologies are important to our defense and intelligence communities and you know to help them meet their purposes uh and important missions to keep our country safe and secure and so both the the defense and intelligence community uh do make investments in in earth observing technologies now the well-spent part comes in because uh civil agencies such as the usgs do benefit from those investments made by our our defense and intelligence community partners and so it helps us to reduce our our cost because the investments that they are making uh save us from making those those same investments we also take advantage of of bulk buying and you know this is something that each of us can understand right when we go to the store and we need to buy paper towels we know if we buy an eight pack of paper towels uh the per cost of each paper towel roll is cheaper if we buy a pack of eight versus if we buy them in just packets of individually wrapped right and so we benefit from this bulk of buying and i'm going to come back back uh to that concept in a bit as well and so uh within my center we'd like to say that we operate in this triple junction or the intersection of the defense and intelligence community with federal civil agencies such as usgs and this triple junction is really good government and through this this idea of sunk cost well spent uh we we believe that we're saving the taxpayer uh quite a bit of money now uh an example of this uh sunk cost well spent is really something that i think each of us uh on this uh lecture or listing tonight can understand and that is that our phones are devices that we carry around with us we now have the ability to tell us where we are or to help give us directions if we're going from one location to the next well that location information is coming from the global positioning system uh or also called gps now the global positioning system is a is a series of satellites that have been planned built launched and operated first by the united states air force and now by the united states space force so currently as of today there are 30 gps satellites in earth orbit now originally the gps system was designed for military navigation purposes but now by law it is required to to also support civil uh purposes so that's why each of us with a phone or a device are able to connect up and know our location or the location of that device through access to gps now truthfully gps touches every part of our society and economy you know during the last couple years of the covet pandemic many of us have benefited by at home deliveries well those delivery trucks are planning their route with gps so anything dealing with transportation whether it's trains trucks ships planes all rely on on gps of first responders when they need directions for you know get to our house or a location that called 9-1-1 uh and so on so very ingrained in our society well this is a sunk cost well spent these this is an investment that the department of defense has made but we everyday citizens have access to that so okay that is some cost well spent so what is remote sensing uh sort of the classic textbook definition is it's it's acquiring the data or information without making physical contact and within the earth sciences it is a very vital tool and i'll be spending a good part of my presentation giving examples of how we use remote sensing uh within the earth sciences so just a few examples so if you're standing on a on a hill viewing a valley but below you are a remote sensing instrument you're observing that valley below but you're not physically in contact with the valley and in the same way if you're taking a photograph of a scene that camera is your remote sensing instrument and and again you're not physically touching or a part of that scene but you're you're some distance away so a couple of examples from the sciences so a sonar instrument on a ship that's imaging the ocean floor is a is a remote sensing instrument so from my world if we're putting a sensor in a satellite that's in earth or orbit and that sensor is imaging uh the earth's surface it is a remote sensing instrument so i mentioned that that image of the statue of liberty well this particular image was acquired from the worldview 2 satellite uh which is in earth orbit about 480 miles above the earth's surface so that image was taken almost 500 miles away truly remote when we talk about remote uh sensing now the uh the worldview 2 satellite is owned by a company called maps r and uh the national reconnaissance office has a contract currently with max r uh to provide maxar or images from max our uh satellites to the defense and military community and to civil agencies such as the usgs so that's how i ike was able to acquire that image now that image was bought and paid for through that contract that the national reconnaissance office has so i didn't have to you know pay for that image out of my budget it's it's already been bought and paid for kind of that concept of bulk buying right this image should only be bought once by the taxpayer we shouldn't have the usgs buy it and the military buy it no we should just buy that image once so it's a it's a good deal for the taxpayer so um so two two types of uh remote sensing sensors a passive sensor and that image of the statue of liberty is a an example of a passive sensor where the the world v2 satellite and earth or orbit uh was picking up the sun's reflection right the sun was uh shining on the statue it was reflecting back into space and the worldview 2 sensor picked up that image so that's a an example of a passive sensor we also have active sensors where the sensor itself creates a pulse of energy that in this case goes from the satellite down to the earth's surface bounces back up and is acquired or picked up uh by that same uh sensor so radar is a is a good example of a of a passive uh sensor so this is an example of a passive uh sensor we we have this uh this area of the elution i islands i was given a taco while bat back and uh one of the usgs senior leaders was in the audience and i actually had it titled this a typical weather day in the illusions and he kind of started laughing out loud and he called us as no paul that's a good weather day and so in this particular case what we actually wanted to acquire was an image of volcanoes that were beneath that cloud but that that passive sensor the sun was reflecting off the cloud and that's what this sensor picked up whereas what we truly wanted was an image like this this is an example of an active sensor or taken from the terrace rx uh satellite that's um operated by the german uh space uh uh the german space agency folks and the advantage of radar it's able to penetrate clouds it's able to penetrate ash uh and and smoke and you can see clearly those those images of the of the volcanoes and so my office uh is is able then to to understand but better understand what is going on on those volcanoes mitch mentioned that next month's public lecture is is from a colleague of of mine that will be speaking more about volcano so think back to to to this talk we work very closely uh with the alaska volcano observatory and provide in information uh to them okay so another uh important type of remote sensing is infrared imaging now this this cannot be seen by the visible eye it's it's uh it's actually more felt as uh heat but with the within the earth those sciences it's very important to help us detect wildfires to study the health of vegetation uh to look for water and to study water uh soil moisture climatology amongst the other examples so the two images here the image on top is just a normal what we would call a visible image where it's uh that's just a passive uh a passive image that the sun is reflecting off of the smoke but the bottom image is an infrared image and so you can clearly then see the areas of orange and yellow are where the fire is is located so that infrared image is picking up that heat so just one more example a little bit larger perhaps easier to see from a fire last hall and again in the center of that image you're able to to clearly see where that um see right up here that's where that fire is is located okay so just to wrap up my definition of remote sensing uh within the earth sciences there are many many applications i couldn't possibly capture them on a single slide i just gave you some examples here and i'll you can read them as i go through i also have a couple of images to show now these images come from the landsat satellite which is operated by the usgs in partnership with our our nasa partners so this is an example of imperial valley california you can clearly see the agricultural area in bright green this is an example in nevada so good to study the geology uh in the image this is kilauea a volcano in hawaii and you can see uh the the black there is is um is the is the more recent uh volcano lava and then finally an image of denver colorado useful to to stud study the growth of of urban areas so um again remote sensing is a vital tool uh within the earth uh sciences okay uh the third question i'm going to answer is so how did the u.s geological survey a civilian agency come to partner with the military and intelligence community so i'm i'm actually going to start in uh 1869 with john wesley powell powell served as a soldier he was a union soldier during the civil war he lost part of his right arm in the battle of shiloh and he served under general ulysses s grant for part of the time that he was serving after the war he became a geology professor and began to explore the west in 1869 he made plans to journey down uh the green and colorado rivers with a goal of of uh traveling through the grand canyon now he went to look for funds to help his trip he did not receive or was not provided any funds from the government it was all private funds but he did go to his old commanding general and ask general grant is there anything you can do to help me in my trip grant said look i i can't give you any money but i can allow you to buy uh uh i can a light allow you to buy supplies off of army con track so again that would have been a huge cost savings to powell because the army is going to be doing this bulk and buying and presumably they already would have had uh the supplies out west near powell's trip now i don't know if powell ever took advantage of that but he was offered that opportunity so a good example of the military uh and the connection with the military benefiting in this case and and earth uh science denture so uh powell continued to explore the west until 1881 when he became the second director of the usgsn where he served for 13 years and was very influential in the early times of usgs so a couple years after powell started his exploration army lieutenant george wheeler was assigned the task to map the west west of the hundredth meridian which is a line that goes from uh beginning in north dakota down through texas so imagine that line and he was tasked with mapping uh everything west of that it was not well mapped uh not well explored or or understood now wheeler was trained as an en engineer or a topographic en engineer at west point and so that was his duties in the army was basically exploring and mapping now um the wheeler survey and what became the powell survey and two other great surveys of the west uh congress merged together in 1879 to form the usgs and so wheeler while he he didn't continue on and work for usgs he continued his army career what he started to map the west and the processes and procedures that he developed came to usgs and formed the basis of our topographic mapping program and i believe my colleague mike tishler gave a public lecture last fall perhaps uh on the successor the national geospatial program so again that was that was army knowledge technology expertise coming into civilian government all right one more example and that's from world war one so at the beginning of world war one uh many of the usgs topographic engineers as our cartographers were known at the the time uh joined the army uh world war one saw many technological advances the use of airplanes for one and the use of of putting cameras in airplanes flying those airplanes over the battlefield taking images or photographs of the battlefield and using those aerial photographs to create and update maps updated maps of the battle now after the war those topographic engineers came back to their civilian aid agencies there's one example is claude burnside who joined the army as a captain later promoted to a lieutenant colonel and he eventually became after the war the chief topographic engineer of usgs so they brought back uh to usgs and other civil aid agencies this knowledge and expertise developed during wartime how to make maps from aerial photographs and the whole science of what we now call photogrammetry was developed by these civilian agencies with expertise developed during the war okay so let's jump up to 1960 uh where the story of my office kind of begins so 1960 august of 1960 was the launch of corona the nation's first photo reconnaissance satellite this was this was an absolute um technical challenge so to build a rocket build a camera that could withstand a rocket launch with stand out outer space operate that camera in space turning it on and on and off when you wanted to take in the images advance that film into a a return capsule return that capsule through earth's atmosphere capture the capsule midair that's the photograph here is is uh capturing the capsule in midair uh and then bringing that film back down to earth and processing it so uh corona saw many first the first uh you know man-made object retrieved from space the first mapping from space uh and the first film taken from space so but it was a huge cost there were it took 13 prior missions before they were able to successfully return film uh to earth that could use so a lot of cost went into that uh here's an example of a of a corona image taken in 1969 of the san francisco and golden gate bay area so you see the the good quality that this was uh even back then in 1969 so because of that great cost and great investment the government was making folks begin to ask questions the the then bureau of the budget uh ask g uh uh civilian agencies like usgs can you use this newfangled ability to uh to to take images from uh from space for your mapping the answer is was yes uh president johnson's a science advisor established a committee that investigated the scientific uses of this photography usgs had somebody on that committee all this culminated in congress appropriating usgs funds to build our own secure facility back then the existence of corona and this capability was was highly classified so we had to build a special secure facility in order to to even use uh the corona film so we began to up update and revise our topographic maps other federal agencies came in and started to use the film for their own missions within our facility now then 1974 happened and the new york times published an article uh with allegations that the intelligence community was was spying on americans president ford established a commission chaired by his vice president nelson rockefeller to look at those allegations so uh two critical pages of that report and i know this is too small for you to uh to see but uh chapter 16 domestic activities of the directorate of science and technology uh section two overhead photography of the united states and then uh the relative pages 230-231 so in that report they uh are on those pages they actually said that yes we have been uh the s cia or central intelligence agency in this case that was operating corona was actually imaging domestic areas of the united states but they were providing that film to civilian agencies to help those agencies meet their statutory missions they particularly called out mapping assessing natural disasters oil spill tree tracking helping to plan the alaska pipeline route and you see the others of forest inventory and determining snow cover so uh that report also made a recommendation recommendation number 29 uh that a civilian committee should be re-established the earlier committee president johnson established had been disbanded by this time so the report recommended that a committee be established to provide the necessary oversight and and coordination now president ford that report went to president ford uh he provided answers to what recommendations he was going to take and so there was a recommendation uh that he directed his national security advisor budget director and central intelligence director to actually establish that commitment and they did so via a memo written october 3rd 1975 directed to the secretary of the interior now at first you may wonder why the secretary of interior well it made sense uh the usgs we are a part of this the department of interior we have been up and up operating our own secure facility we have been using the corona data and in 1972 usgs was one of the eight agencies that helped launch the landsat satellite which began to to image uh the land areas of the globe so we had a remote sensing program in place so just a a munition i'm not going to read this word by by word but essentially the what we now call the civil applications committee is one of the functions that my office provides the secretariat for and that committee is to provide the necessary oversight and facilitation of when federal civil agencies use the military and intelligence communities remote sensing capabilities so that that committee as i mentioned is up and running chaired by the usgs director the charter was uh the most recent charter signed by the secretary of interior and the director of national intelligence so 12 civil agency mem members of the committee the the departments of interior agriculture and commerce the first three there also the federal emergency management agency and the next road nasa the national science foundation department of transportation the coast guard last row department of health and human services environmental protection agency the army corps of engineers and the tennessee valley authority so all and the army corps of engineers for their domestic uh we're also joined by seven associate members these are all members that are officially a part of the intelligence community uh the national reconnaissance office national geospatial intelligence agency we work with those two agencies very closely uh departments of homeland security defense intelligence agency national guard bureau departments of state and energy so also have three members that serve in an ex-officio or a policy oversight role the office of the director of national intelligence the president's office of science tech and technology policy and a and a parallel committee uh to the civil applications committee and that's the what's the national committee on geospatial intelligence that oversees the uh the same technologies for the by the military and intelligence community so okay just a couple uh quick stories quick benefits i mentioned we started to revise and update topographic maps we first started to work on the one the 250 000 scale that is one inch on the map is four miles on the ground we did a complete revision of those maps using the kroned data and if you go down to the lower left hand corner is a a description of what data uh what went into making that map and uh bring you down to this line here amendment tree revised by the usgs from aerial photography taken 1974 to 1976 and other data sources now usgs is never vague about the data that we use for our maps or our scientific research were were completely transparent in that realm except back then the fact that we were using corona was classified so we couldn't share that we were using classified information so we came up with this and other data sources so this is what that data source looked like this is uh this image has now been declassified so it's from a the hexagon satellite which was a successor to corona uh and uh that that declassified film is now housed at the earth resources and observations science center in eros or also called eros in sioux falls uh south dakota and it's available via our earth explorer uh website so just another quick benefit this is a one to twenty four thousand scale topographic mapper one inch on the map is two thousand feet on the ground the accompanying hexagon image that was used to update that topographic map and then the revised topographic map and again uh down in the lower corner is the description of the data and you see it you know we had to be vague and say this this other sources were used we also used the corona hexagon to help us determine what parts of the country we needed to revise so we could quickly look at the film evaluate the film versus the topographic maps and determine what areas to revise or what areas we needed to uh to fly aerial photography okay so the crux of of my presentation i just have a whole series of applications uh just to give you a flavor for the type of work that we do so um you know we do uh in my office in particular we we monitor uh volcanoes across the the globe we work with our earthquake scientists and support their needs we do wildfire detection and mapping we've worked with our landslide program we look and support studies on flooding and hurricane relief we help with land water resource management environmental monitoring and finally mapping so the volcanoes so we monitor volcanoes not only for the the local population that might live on that volcano but but also for aviation safety as it turns out a lot of volcanoes are along the aleutian island chain that happens to coincide with the normal air route between north america and asia and so it's very critical that we keep those planes away from any ash clouds that might be generated uh by the volcanoes and so we support the usgs volcano hazards program and its observatories the image map on the right is one that my office created uh we took the base image is again a an image from maxar that we uh we updated after the volcanic eruption this is a bogus law volcano erupted in december of 2016 and we provided this up update and uh provided to our usgs colleagues that operate the volcano the i'm sorry the alaska volcano observatory and they uh posted on their public website we also worked in 2018 with our colleagues at the hawaii hawaii volcano observatory during the kilauea eruption we were tracking the lava flows you see an example here on the right uh and the key thing was to keep to help keep the local population safe from the lava flow so my office was providing information to our colleagues in hawaii that were combining what we took or what we were creating with observations and other data that they had and then daily were posting the updated maps like you see an example there so just uh i couldn't help but uh but put in one more volcano uh image so this was a volcano that erupted in january in the kingdom of tonga this is a before and after image and you see this was a huge eruption that took place so images like this help volcano scientists understand the eruption but also as you'll see examples later on uh this type of imagery also helps with uh with air areas that are impacted by disasters and help with disaster response uh and an important mission that my office um supports is wildfire detection and mapping uh we work wildfire detection with a large number of partners uh and together we feed information to the national interagency fire center uh who then further disseminates uh the wildfire detections out to local responders who are who are able to respond to the fire detections my office also provides a bit of a surge mapping capability we're available to help when there's a large number of fires and our other partners are are are maxed out we're able to help and provide a wildfire response maps like you see on the the slide here that has an outline of a wildfire and hotspots detections so we also have worked with the usgs landslide hazards program uh after hurricane maria devastated puerto rico in september 2017 the landslide folks wanted to document where in the islands uh that in the island that was impacted by landslides so we were able to acquire digital globe imagery for the entire island you see an example here from their report where they documented uh the homes that were destroyed and also the roads that were blocked this is important information uh to the in this case the puerto rico government they're able to ascertain the amount of damage and the roads that that are blocked help in response and help and get help out to their population an example from a hurricane this was uh the impact of hurricane ida that that devastated came up began in louisiana came up and drenched parts of new jersey and new york you see before and after images here the upper two images are td bank ballpark in bridgewater new jersey and the lower two images are manville new jersey now my office is responsible for tap tasking and acquiring uh imagery in this case from maxar but we also work um with the earth resources observation and science center in sioux falls uh who provide the data uh through their hazards data distribution system and you see the website up there so um so this is important to local and state government responders and other others that are helping in disaster response and recovery they're able to to access this in imagery as well so a oil spill monitoring example from our colleagues at the national oceanic and atmospheric administration an example of the digital globe imagery on the left and radar data on the right they're able to use both kinds of imagery again a passive sensor and an active sensor to help map and monitor uh oil spills so just a couple of examples uh from the environmental and ecological studies this is a a project that we provided data to the forest service uh for helping them to track this southern pine beetle activity that that can devastate large areas of forest we've supported a number of folks including usgs and again uh the national oceanic and atmospheric administration on doing various river habitat studies and finally the national park service one of our sister bureaus in the interior department who was determining vegetation cover and looking at bison areas and also looking at prairie dog town conditions and then an example from the national science foundation uh who were able to use maxar data for the entire continent of antarctica to provide an up-to-date terrain map we we had terrain rain maps they weren't terribly accurate but the national science foundation in partnership with the polar geospatial center at the university of minnesota were able to update this terrain map which is uh which has been very beneficial for studies in antarctica and then a project that my office has been responsible for the global fiducial library uh it's it's areas across the globe that we have been systematically collecting data for uh or of since the 1990s we are able to derive and release pub publicly this data this is an example from fire island national seashore uh there was super storm sandy came through and punched that that in inlet and then we are able to track through this imagery how that inlet grew over time so just to end my presentation with a couple of international examples my office also supports the international charter for space and major disasters where countries across the world who have remote sensing capabilities and commercial companies as well agree to provide that data at no charge to a country that's experiencing any type of a disaster so again that data are made available through the hazards data distribution system and my office provides the data tasking this is an example of uh in south africa who experienced some terrible flooding and landslides again a before and after in the image so you can track the damage this is an example from micronesia that experienced some severe coastal flooding uh that damaged a causeway that connected uh two of their more populated islands and so you can see the damage to the causeway let's go get my cursor right about there is the damage to the causeway um and finally uh another oil spill example this is um interesting story i i showed you the image of the tonga volcano well that volcanic eruption was so huge and large it created tsunami waves that traveled all the way to south america it rocked a ship causing that ship to discharge oil and that oil was in a pretty environmentally sensitive area and so uh our friends at noaa uh produced the the oil spill map that you see there to help our our friends in peru track that oil so that pretty much uh ends my my presentation i just wanted to end though with a word of thanks you know i've been at this job for five and a half years and i have just been very impressed by the partners and the folks that we work with in the military department defense and intelligence community you know as you've learned in this briefing we've been partnering with them for over 50 years and and they these are dedicated professionals they're they're there to help protect and defend our country uh they do that very well in my opinion but they've also been a tremendous help to civil agencies such as usgs and you know i i have a dead deaf that has done all the work that i've been able to present here and so just want to give a shout out to my staff for their dedicated work and with that i am going to turn it back over to mitch and happy to answer any questions that folks might have if you have questions after this briefing ends you can uh you can always feel free to email mail me mitch back over to you okay thank you paul um it was really interesting to see how much remote sensing data is used and how much is used and where it's used and how it's used as a reminder if you'd like to ask a question remember to click on the q a chat window look for the question mark in the upper right hand corner of your screen and we can get to the questions um let's see first question is from a from john h and he wants to know do we have the same bulk buy arrangements with the germans that who got the aleutian islands image and what about imagery from other countries okay all right good question john thanks for ask asking so um so the german images are um uh were actually acquired from our our relationship with the national geospatial intelligence agency agency right they're the agency that is responsible for mapping providing maps to the the military uh and intelligence community folks so they have got partnerships with other countries uh who often share data with each each each other and so uh the end nga or the national geospatial intelligence agency uh was using the pterosaur x data for a project that they were doing and we they were able to share they had gotten permit mission to share some of that data with the the usgs okay um can usgs cac test nro satellites to get imagery for disasters easy earthquakes yes we we we do task uh and use nro uh satellites in addition to the commercial uh examples that i showed here okay um from susan wants to know can you describe what you mean when you talk about the civil application committee providing oversight sure you have any examples good good all right thank you tried to cram in a lot in for 45 minutes so i i appreciate the questions because that allows me to to say some things that i had to kind of cut out so um so because we are using remote sensing data that is procured bought and paid for uh or and appropriated from congress to the department of defense uh there are restrictions to using that uh data right we still have to you know protect uh private uh liberties uh we have to you know protect how we use that data we have to protect um uh the use of that to make sure it's not misused right and so there's a number of uh executive orders laws and regulations that that control and prohibit our use so we can't image u.s persons for example and so the civil applications committee was then established to provide that necessary oversight so oversight is is always required uh when we're using these images images i'm sorry domestically or by domestic agencies so hope hope that answers your question okay another question from john h um approxim approximately how much time elapses from when the military takes images of disaster situations can you make the images available to the civilian agencies that need them yeah so i'm i'm going to answer that question in terms of the the commercial uh vendors um because that's where we work with most closely for disasters because that imagery can be made available uh you know to state and local responders uh and so we we get that imagery pretty quickly if there's an ongoing disaster and folks know that there are lives you know in danger um i don't know if i can put an exact time on on it other than we can get it in the hands of responders i'm going to say within an hour but it's probably less than that but that would be my kind of my my best guess to put a time on to it okay um wants to know do you have hyperspectral sensors that play also so um the um there are a couple of of countries and there's a couple commercial vendors that are uh that are planning to launch hyper spectral um there's um i actually just came from a conference a couple weeks ago and there was a number of vendors uh there sharing their their plans uh to launch hyperspectral i think um one or two other countries have it as well although we're not we're not right now accessing it so any of the hyperspectral that we get is typically uh collected from an air airplane or a sensor in an air airplane that's readily available to us or in an unmanned aerial system as as well many of our our scientists will use hyperspectral uh collecting collected from those two platforms okay um do we have links to other agencies for observations of the moon and other planets well uh maybe a future public lecture from our astro geology program folks have you hear i would i would say talk to them about that one yeah yeah that's uh we we have an astro geology office in flagstaff arizona uh they're they're doing moon and mars in the imaging okay and a question from alex who says how much of the total historical mapping projects of usgs reside only on paper and not in any via any digital gis formats okay um good question i i'm not i don't have a what i would suggest is that was a question that mike tishler may have answered when he did his public lecture and mitch you may remember or amelia that was last fall sometime so i'm not going to answer that because i don't want to be wrong but i do know there is there they have scanned many many maps but i i don't know how many or i won't say all because i don't want to be wrong but i think mike answered that question back in his public election more of it is more and more of it is made available digitally um yeah maybe you know like pdfs or tiffs and not necessarily gis format yeah they they try to do what's called a geo either geotiff or geopdf because we do recognize that many folks want to put it into a geographic information system what i would suggest is visit the national map website and if they're for historical maps that's where they're they're made of available right uh the second part of the question is um how much usgs historical mapping materials has been degraded by time or even lost oh uh that's kind of outside of my program purview to answer um you know we've got we've got the usgs library which would have a complete collection and i i know they they take good good care of of of all of their documents but i don't i'm not really in a place to answer that one yeah i know that aeros data center is working on scanning a lot of the historical aerial photos because there is a there is an image you know there is a problem with the um uh degradation of the photo negatives sure sure so i mentioned that i had some examples of some of the corona and hex hexagon when that film is declassified a copy of the film was sent uh to eros and sioux falls so um they um we're actually working uh to get all of that film uh a high resolution scan right now it's it's scanned on demand so if a customer wants part of the film scan that hasn't been scanned there's a one-time 30 dollar charge uh that's that high resolution scan is is made and then it's it's made it available to whoever pays for it and then it's added to the collection that is publicly available i i know that's the case for the declassified film and there are efforts un underway there's a lot more film that we expect to be declassified and there's certainly an interest to get that scanned uh before the film degrades um what are the next challenges and new technology developments in remote sensing oh wow what a cool question uh well you know um the question about hyperspectral came up and um and uh once once we get a couple of companies you know right now there's a number of companies uh that um that have satellites in or orbit right and so um and actually just yesterday i mentioned the national reconnaissance office um is the is the office that contracts with the commercial company so actually just yesterday they announced uh three new contracts the current contract that we get the max our data from is going to be expiring shortly and uh three new contracts that wouldn't put in place with the maxar planet and black sky three three different companies uh planet is uh their goal is to image the earth every day and so i think the challenge is now that i've had some time to think about it is there there is so much imagery that's being generated we can't put our human eyes on onto it and so there's lots of effort at what we call artificial intelligence so you know can a computer look look quote unquote add an image and pick things out so you know in the examples that i showed of a before and after you know the landslide for example or the flood you know could a computer counted the houses that have been flooded or could a computer showed you the streets and roads that are blocked without a human interpreting that that would be a tremendous benefit and to do that quickly right because you know huge areas might be flooded during a hurricane well it it takes right now humans a lot of time to look through all that in the imagery so this whole idea of of artificial intelligence or machine learning is really the next big goal of remote sensing so great great question yes it was um john h wants to know will these slides be made available in some form on the web either for download or simply to consume his web pages i think uh you all recorded this right or are we yes so the recording will be will be available yeah the video will be up in about a week okay okay uh question from chris wants to know can you estimate the value of federal dollars saved by leveraging the nra nro contracts to buy once and use many times oh i wish i could man that's a that's a question you know i've i've talked to some uh colleagues who are economists and i said can you answer this question for me so uh so no is my honest answer uh but uh i i really really wish that i i i could because i i think that's a very valuable um that would be a very valuable number to to have so you know i can tell you i mentioned the contra tracks that the nro announced uh yesterday and two of the companies have have come out with you know how how big the value of the contracts are i think one was like three and a half billion dollars and the other was i don't remember the exact number between one to two billion dollars so you know what i tell folks is you know look um my office is is able to task these multi-billion dollar uh condo tracks but that that's not the same that's not the answer to the to the question but i sure wish i could okay last question it looks like um bill k wants to know have you ever used satellite images taken at night on a project maybe fire mapping so that's where radar comes in uh you know i showed the example of of radar being able to penetrate a cloud and so that's where uh where radar doesn't need this sunlight so it can operate and does we do up you know we're able to to task the radar uh to uh to collect a day or a night okay i think that's all questions we have time for this evening um it's also all the questions we received so i would like to thank you again paul for your talk today and answering all those great questions and again thank all of you who came out and joined us today in case you would like to watch this again or share it with others paul's lecture will be available in about a week for on-demand viewing at our website at www.usgs.gov

pls you also find around 180 archived public lectures on that site spanning over 20 years of public lectures like this so be sure to check it out on the website you will also find our lecture schedule for the remainder of 2022 coming up this year we have talks on topics ranging from geologic mapping to endangered bumblebees if you would like to be added to our mailing list you receive notices to receive notices about our public lectures just send us an email at wmc esic at usgs.gov and you can eat and we'll add you to the list finally we hope you will join us join us again next month on june 30th at 6 p.m pacific time for michelle's combs talk on alaska volcanoes until then thank you again for joining us and have a good evening bye for now

2022-06-03 23:56

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