Remote Sensing C

[whythelongface]

knottingpurple and I generally hover over this thread twenty times a day.

To answer your question, we found a database of instruments aboard pretty much every single Earth Observing satellite ever, although I don't really remember where it is. Honestly, Google Images is your friend, along with practice test. There will be some images that will be really easy to identify, such as tornado tracks, wildfires and burn marks, floods, human activity, glacial retreat, but others that are much, much more subtle. The only way to go is to get yourself used to pretty much any kind of image that might show up. Get yourself a textbook too - I recommend the Lillesand Remote Sensing and Image Interpretation because it has some nice color plates in the middle, but there are more textbooks out there for Remsen that also have nice pictures, I'm sure.

Do you think the online versions (I've only found up to the 5th edition online) are useful? I know that there are newer ones, but they seem expensive.

I think so, but of course don't limit yourself to just textbooks. Although they are great for image interpretation, there are much, much more images at your disposal on the internet. 5th edition is fairly recent, and I think that the biggest differences in content between the 5th and the latest edition is content, not pictures.

[knottingpurple]

knottingpurple and I generally hover over this thread twenty times a day.

To answer your question, we found a database of instruments aboard pretty much every single Earth Observing satellite ever, although I don't really remember where it is. Honestly, Google Images is your friend, along with practice test. There will be some images that will be really easy to identify, such as tornado tracks, wildfires and burn marks, floods, human activity, glacial retreat, but others that are much, much more subtle. The only way to go is to get yourself used to pretty much any kind of image that might show up. Get yourself a textbook too - I recommend the Lillesand Remote Sensing and Image Interpretation because it has some nice color plates in the middle, but there are more textbooks out there for Remsen that also have nice pictures, I'm sure.

Do you think the online versions (I've only found up to the 5th edition online) are useful? I know that there are newer ones, but they seem expensive.

Last year whythelongface and I had both the 2nd edition and the 7th edition with us before Nats, and the second edition might have had technology a little bit too out of date to be useful, but I'm sure that a lot of the 5th edition is still reasonably accurate. With some events, information might not change that much from year to year, but when you're entire event is about a technology which changes this fast, the older the textbook is, the more work you have to do cross referencing to make sure that that satellite it says is the most recent version actually is the most recent version etc etc. For practice with images or for theory, an older edition probably works equally well, but since something like GOES-16 being GOES East isn't going to show up in even the most recent textbook because it happened so recently, there are going to be even more errors of that type the older the textbook you're using is.

But otherwise yeah whythelongface is just a snob in his choice of Lillesand edition (and he knows I don't mean that so it's okay) and you could probably use the 5th edition and a bunch of internet research and have a perfectly competent understanding of the event.

[Alex-RCHS]

knottingpurple and I generally hover over this thread twenty times a day.

Hmm...
Both of you responded within 65 minutes, so this actually seems about right.

Thank you both for your help.

[anatomyremotetowers]

Hi guys, at competitions I always struggle with the image interpretation questions because I never know how to identify what satellite produced a particular image from just looking at it. Do you have any tips or tricks for identifying the producing satellite/sensor?

[geniusjohn5]

Hi guys, at competitions I always struggle with the image interpretation questions because I never know how to identify what satellite produced a particular image from just looking at it. Do you have any tips or tricks for identifying the producing satellite/sensor?

The best thing to do is to practice with image interpretation questions that are on past tests and/or look at satellite images and online and read the provided explanations/analysis of those images? There will be some COMMON/SIMILAR ones that show up on tests. Some common examples include LIDAR images, images that concern anything regarding vegetation, climate images, and images produced by the most well-known satellites, like Landsat or A-train satellites' images. If you familiarize yourself with these images, you'll do better on this portion of test.

[geniusjohn5]

So I was doing a test and a question asked, "Clouds have an enormous impact on Earth's climate, reflecting about _______ of the total amount of sunlight that hits the Earth's atmosphere back into space." The correct answer in the blank is 35% but I thought the correct answer should be 23%. Can anyone confirm which percentage is correct and whether this question/answer is a typo?

[Justin72835]

So I was doing a test and a question asked, "Clouds have an enormous impact on Earth's climate, reflecting about _______ of the total amount of sunlight that hits the Earth's atmosphere back into space." The correct answer in the blank is 35% but I thought the correct answer should be 23%. Can anyone confirm which percentage is correct and whether this question/answer is a typo?

Clouds cover most of the Earth at any given time so I think it would be safe to assume that the albedo of the Earth (30%, 0.30) is pretty close to the overall albedo of clouds.This value is slightly less than 35%, which makes sense because the ocean and land have lower albedos while clouds tend to have greater albedos. So I would say that it probably isn't a typo and is actually correct.

[whythelongface]

So I was doing a test and a question asked, "Clouds have an enormous impact on Earth's climate, reflecting about _______ of the total amount of sunlight that hits the Earth's atmosphere back into space." The correct answer in the blank is 35% but I thought the correct answer should be 23%. Can anyone confirm which percentage is correct and whether this question/answer is a typo?

The general accepted value for the overall albedo of the Earth system is 0.3, which includes both snow/ice and clouds. Honestly, a wider range of answers should've been accepted.

[knottingpurple]

So I was doing a test and a question asked, "Clouds have an enormous impact on Earth's climate, reflecting about _______ of the total amount of sunlight that hits the Earth's atmosphere back into space." The correct answer in the blank is 35% but I thought the correct answer should be 23%. Can anyone confirm which percentage is correct and whether this question/answer is a typo?

The general accepted value for the overall albedo of the Earth system is 0.3, which includes both snow/ice and clouds. Honestly, a wider range of answers should've been accepted.

Is the question asking about the albedo of clouds, or the proportion of incoming solar radiation which is reflected by clouds? Because given that clouds don't cover the entire world, the percentage of incoming solar radiation hitting the earth which is reflected by clouds is different from the percentage of solar radiation which hits clouds which gets reflected by clouds.

[windu34]

For those of you who competed in Remote Sensing at Princeton yesterday, I have finished digitizing all of the test and survey data. Since you guys made it possible for me to have this data, I feel it is only fair you all have access to it as well. Here the link! https://drive.google.com/open?id=1frIOz ... cEvR9ZYOm1