I think vocab, formulas, and A-train satellites are the best things to start with. They come up on a lot of tests, and once you know them once, you know them permanently.geniusjohn5 wrote:So does anybody have any tips for studying? Such as plans, what and how exactly to learn and study the material, what to use for my notes on test day, etc? I'm completely new to this event and I notice that I'm being BOMBARDED with a ton of information that's almost seems like a foreign language to me? If anyone could help, I'd greatly appreciate it. Thanks.
So have a section of your notes sheet with commonly used terms about remote sensing - nadir/zenith, along/across track, temporal/spatial/spectral/radiometric resolution, active/passive sensing, etc, and that should be quite useful on tests (until sheer experience means you have them memorized, lol).
In terms of formulas, a lot of tests ask you to calculate wavelength from frequency of light, to calculate the peak wavelength of a blackbody, or to calculate the total energy radiated per surface area of a blackbody, which I believe all have formulas named on the rules, so again, making sure you know and can apply this handful of formulas will help you a good way along for many tests.
A-train satellites also come up a lot - tests will ask you about all sorts of different satellites, but the A-train, and maybe Terra and Landsat, tend to be the most important, so learning them again will help you get started. And after you understand a few satellites you can always go back and add more information. Try to understand what different satellites measure, not just dates or agencies, which really isn't the point of the event.
Other parts of the rules aren't so clear cut to learn - the topic this year and last year has been climate change processes, so you definitely want to understand the composition of the atmosphere, how this is changing, how climate is affected by these changes, what the more indirect effects of climate change are, but I can't give you a specific checklist on it, just study greenhouse gases and climate and aerosols and Earth's energy budget. Image interpretation is also much wider, and if there's someone who doesn't struggle with it I haven't met them, so all I can say is to have seen examples of different types of images before so they're familiar and you can make sensible inferences when they come up. There are practice tests on the test exchange, and you can probably find more elsewhere, so trying to understand images and then seeing the correct answer and looking up more about that thing is basically how you improve for that. Image interpretation, unless you have an image on your notes sheet you're comparing it to, doesn't seem to make as much use of the notes sheet, and I've always used that for vocab, satellite information, formulas, and other annoying details I don't want to memorize, but this year there are even more pages of notes sheets so you can try to make full use of all of them.
