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At least 451 records · Page 25

New Capabilities, Products and Usage of NASA Earth Imagery for Near Real Time Applications

NASA's Worldview and Global Imagery Browse Services (GIBS) have provided near real time (NRT) imagery to the public since 2011 and continue to add new capabilities and products. As a web map app for GIBS, Worldview (https://worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov) has recently added new features to support NRT applications such as a "before" and "after" comparison capability and support for geostationary imagery. As an open set of standards-based web map services, GIBS (https://earthdata.nasa.gov/gibs) has added several new NRT imagery products and will soon add new capabilities for better integration with Geographic Information System (GIS) clients. One of NASA's original NRT imagery systems and a long-running workhorse, Rapid Response, has been retired and replaced with a modern, mobile-friendly, and low-bandwidth app dubbed Worldview Snapshots (https://wvs.earthdata.nasa.gov). Finally, this presentation will demonstrate recent usage of these tools and services by those in the NRT community.

Boller, R.↗

Estimating Everglades Peat Reserves and Losses on a Landscape-Scale

The Florida Everglades formed from sawgrass and other aquatic plant remains that have accumulated over thousands of years and is a patterned peatland. The region was initially drained for agricultural and urban development in the late 1800s by the lowering of Lake Okeechobee water levels through canal drainage. Over the course of the past century, the Everglades has further been altered by the construction of canals and levees to provide control of Lake Okeechobee and Everglades water levels. The drainage has caused the loss of much of the peat of the Everglades by peat fires and microbial oxidation, much of it occurring between the 1880s and the 1950s. Plans for Everglades restoration are designed to provide additional water to flow through the remaining Everglades. Additional water into the Everglades would prevent further peat loss by reducing oxidation and encouraging the accretion of peat that has been lost. This potentially could result in the sequestration of significant quantities of atmospheric carbon. We used historic records to determine how much peat was there originally and how much has been lost. Over the past century and a half, approximately 50% of the original Everglades has been lost to agricultural and urban development. In addition, much of the peat in the remaining Everglades Protection Area has been lost. We used Geographic Information Systems technologies to determine the volume and mass of peat, the mass of carbon for each of the predrainage landscapes as well as the current Everglades regions. To do this, historical and current surveys within the Everglades were used to create elevation maps. With these maps, along with a bedrock contour map of south Florida, and soils data from the USEPA, we estimated Everglades peat characteristics. These calculations provide rough, quantitative estimates of the historical Everglades, its current condition, and the changes in the peat soil that have taken place since the 19th century. Given the uncertainties in the hindcasting of some of these data sets, this analysis provides rough estimates for the peat volumes and related constituents. Our calculations indicate that the current Everglades roughly contains less than 24% of theoriginal peat volume, 17% of its mass and 19% of its carbon. The work described was fully supported by the South Florida Water Management District, West Palm Beach, FL

Thomas Walter Dreschel↗

VEDA: Visualization, Exploration, & Data Analysis

NASA's Visualization, Exploration, and Data Analysis (VEDA) project is an open-source science cyberinfrastructure for data processing, visualization, exploration, and geographic information systems (GIS) capabilities. Developed collaboratively and mostly reusing existing open-source components, VEDA consolidates GIS delivery mechanisms, processing platforms, analysis services, and visualization tools and provides an ecosystem of open tools for addressing Earth science research and application needs through the public-facing VEDA Dashboard. In this presentation, Dr. Freitag will provide an overview of VEDA and how it can potentially serve the AOS community.

Brian Freitag↗

Big Cypress Water Resources: Using Earth Observations to Assess Water Quality in Big Cypress Reservation, FL

Upstream agricultural development and runoff are driving harmful algal blooms in the Big Cypress Reservation. The Seminole Tribe of Florida Environmental Resource Management Department monitors water quality in the Big Cypress Reservation, located on the north end of Big Cypress National Preserve. The Environmental Resource Management Department aims to incorporate Earth observations into its investigative approach, which consists of Geographic Information Systems and in situ water sampling. We assessed the feasibility of using Earth observations to measure harmful algal blooms over time and identify vulnerable areas. We analyzed data from multiple remote sensing platforms and sensors, including Landsat 8 Thermal Infrared Spectrometer(TIRS), Landsat 9 TIRS-2, Landsat 9 Operational Land Imager 2, Sentinel-2 MultiSpectral Instrument, and Sentinel-3 Ocean and Land Color Instrument. We determined that it was challenging to use Sentinel-3, Landsat 8, and Landsat 9 imagery for monitoring the canals within the Reservation, and that Sentinel-2 was the most capable platform for the study area. Using Sentinel-2, we created spectral indices for the detection of algal blooms. We used these indices to measure algal blooms at 8 stations across the Big Cypress Reservation. We then created time series and seasonal decompositions of in situ water sample data and indices to visualize relationships between datasets, along with correlation matrices. Our correlations were not conclusive. However, we found that the spectral indices have the potential to detect algal blooms. Lastly, we evaluated Maxar WorldView-3 imagery and found that using data from sensors with higher spatial resolutions would improve results.

Remote sensing↗

Location Selection of Fast-Charging Station for Heavy-Duty EVs Using GIS and Grid Analysis: Preprint

This work presents a systematic methodology for the location selection of fast-charging stations for heavy-duty Electric Vehicles (EVs) based on both geospatial and electrical grid analysis. The geo-spatial analysis is based on real-world geographic information system (GIS) data of road networks and existing supportive infrastructures. The grid analysis is implemented based on node level analysis of potential impacts on voltages and power losses in distribution system. A case study using realistic three-phase unbalanced distribution feeder from California and extracted real-world GIS data is used to demonstrate the intuitiveness and effectiveness of the proposed methodology for the location selection of fast charging station for heavy duty EVs.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗

A Modularized Urban Scale Building Energy Modeling Framework Designed with An Open Mind

In recent years, physics-based building energy modeling (BEM) has started being used to evaluate the performance of buildings in the context of connected communities and on an urban scale to study their aggregated energy use, interactions, and impacts on the energy supply infrastructure and environment. The development of urban-scale BEM solutions needs extensive effort. Existing attempts tend to focus on different aspects of BEM on an urban scale, such as collecting as-built building data from different information sources, integrating geometry modeling with geographic information systems (GISs), representing operational and occupancy profiles, automating workflow, processing and visualizing the results, and conducting large-scale simulations. Urban-scale BEM development would benefit from multi-disciplinary research areas and from an open platform to adopt advancements on data sources and tools. For these purposes, this research proposes a modularized bottom-up model creation and simulation framework that is built on the state-of-the-art BEM tools and can accommodate different building stock data. This framework uses a standardized schema to describe building design and operational characteristics, and it can be instantiated from different building survey datasets with heterogeneous structures. The paper demonstrates how thousands of surveyed buildings from the 2012 U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey (CBECS) were one-to-one converted to EnergyPlus models through the schema and the model generation process, then simulated with distributed computing, and their results are summarized.

Lei, Xuechen↗

Geospatial Data Platform for All

Spatiotemporal data has evolved in scale due to augmented use in cross-domain applications. Simultaneously, there is substantial growth in the availability of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) data provided by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) along with other federal, state, county, or local agencies through open-data portals and public access APIs. However, data availability does not equate with accessibility. Large-scale analyses and applications require robust, performant data management with co-location of data storage and computing. The insufficiency of data management infrastructure compels researchers to adopt ad hoc project- specific GIS data storage solutions (e.g., copying data to High-Performance computer file systems). As an ad hoc storage strategy does not scale, it hampers cross-domain analyses causing difficulty in data reuse and utilizing existing code bases. Furthermore, GIS data is complex and requires expertise to analyze and manipulate due to its intricate data structures and data-specific projection transformations. Despite the challenges, we recognize that derived GIS data products, e.g., satellite or LIDAR-based images, can be used in downstream applications such as AI by domain, but non-GIS experts. To address the data needs and overcome the challenges, we are working towards a GIS Data Platform focused on efficient data storage, data discovery and access, and an API to enable common workflows. We propose a knowledge-graph (KG) approach for data discovery, whereby datasets are semantically linked to higher- level constructs such as projects and research areas. The semantic data links enable researchers to explore datasets in a top-down approach by specifying relevant and meaningful terms (assists in finding hidden data). An advantage is that the nodes and edges in a knowledge graph create built-in semantic documentation. Deeper spatiotemporal connections between data sources can be encoded via Graph Neural Networks (GNN) (Zhang et al., 2021). The KG approach can be extended to integrate the data itself in a Virtual KG (VKG). Our work will derive inspiration from large-scale VKG efforts that have been undertaken or are currently underway as part of the OpenStreetMap project (Ding et al., 2021). For DOE Data Days, we share the proposed geospatial data platform hybrid (cloud/on-prem) architecture, our work-to-date on storing, retrieving, and transforming LiDAR and raster data relevant to two important NREL use-cases, including the Renewable Energy Potential (reV) Model, and present our proposal for a KG based data discovery engine.

data platform↗

Agricultural land cover mapping in the context of a geographically referenced digital information system

The introduction of soil map information to the land cover mapping process can improve discrimination of land cover types and reduce confusion among crop types that may be caused by soil-specific management practices and background reflectance characteristics. Multiple dates of LANDSAT MSS digital were analyzed for three study areas in northern Missouri to produce cover types for major agricultural land cover classes. Digital data bases were then developed by adding ancillary data such as digitized soil and transportation network information to the LANDSAT-derived cover type map. Procedures were developed to manipulate the data base parameters to extract information applicable to user requirements. An agricultural information system combining such data can be used to determine the productive capacity of land to grow crops, fertilizer needs, chemical weed control rates, irrigation suitability, and trafficability of soil for planting.

Stoner, E. R.↗

Report on Coastal Structure Integrated Wave Energy Converters (CSI-WECs)

This report investigates a largely underexplored, and underexploited, application for wave energy: coastal structure integrated wave energy converters (CSI-WECs). These WEC types have significant potential to rapidly advance the wave energy industry while addressing the challenges of coastal community resiliency and marine energy integration and application, and the urgent need for increased coastal protection. To further support the value proposition investigation of this work, three wave energy developers agreed to conduct an energy production analysis of their technology for the four sites identified. Additionally, a geographic information system-based tool was developed that supports efficient and comprehensive site assessment for optimal and high-value deployments.

16 TIDAL AND WAVE POWER↗

GeoAI advances in specific landform mapping

Landform mapping (also referred to as geomorphology or geomorphometry) can be divided into two domains: general and specific (Evans 2012). Whereas general landform mapping categorizes all elements of the study area into landform classes, such as ridges, valleys, peaks, and depressions, the mapping of specific landforms requires the delineation (even if fuzzy) of individual landforms. The former is mainly driven by physical properties such as elevation, slope, and curvature. The latter, however, must consider the cognitive (human) reasoning that discriminates individual landforms in addition to these physical properties (Arundel and Sinha 2018). Both mapping forms are important. General geomorphometry is needed to understand geological and ecological processes and as boundary layer input to climate and environmental models. Specific geomorphometry supports such activities as disaster management and recovery, emergency response, transportation, and navigation. In the United States, individual landforms of interest are named in the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Geographic Names Information System, a point dataset captured specifically to digitize geographic names from the USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection (HTMC). Named landform extent is represented only by the name placement in the HTMC. Recent work has investigated CNN-based deep learning methods to capture these extents in machine-readable form. These studies first relied on physical properties (Arundel et al. 2020) and then included the HTMC as a band in RGB images in limited testing (Arundel et al. 2023). Results from the HTMC dataset surpassed those using just physical properties and using the HTMC alone performed best due to the hillshading and elevation (contour) data incorporated into the topographic maps. However, results fell short of an operational capacity to map all named landforms in the United States. Thus, our current work expands upon past research by focusing on the HTMC and physical information as inputs and the named landform label extents. Specifically, we propose to leverage pre-trained foundation models for segmentation and optical character recognition (OCR) models to jointly map landforms in the United States. Our approach aims to bridge the disparities among the independent information sources to facilitate informed decision-making. The modeling pipeline performs (1) segmentation using the physical information and (2) information extraction using OCR, in parallel. Then a computer vision approach merges the two branches into a labeled segmentation. References: Arundel, Samantha T., Wenwen Li, and Sizhe Wang. 2020. “GeoNat v1.0: A Dataset for Natural Feature Mapping with Artificial Intelligence and Supervised Learning.” Transactions in GIS 24 (3): 556–72. https://doi.org/10.1111/tgis.12633. Arundel, Samantha T, and Gaurav Sinha. 2018. “Validating GEOBIA Based Terrain Segmentation and Classification for Automated Delineation of Cognitively Salient Landforms BT - Proceedings of Workshops and Posters at the 13th International Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT 2017).” In Proceedings of Workshops and Posters at the 13th International Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT 2017), Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography, edited by Paolo Fogliaroni, Andrea Ballatore, and Eliseo Clementini, 9–14. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Arundel, Samantha T., Gaurav Sinha, Wenwen Li, David P. Martin, Kevin G. McKeehan, and Philip T. Thiem. 2023. “Historical Maps Inform Landform Cognition in Machine Learning.” Abstracts of the ICA 6 (August): 1–2. https://doi.org/10.5194/ica-abs-6-10-2023. Evans, Ian S. 2012. “Geomorphometry and Landform Mapping: What Is a Landform?” Geomorphology 137 (1): 94–106. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geomorph.2010.09.029.

machine learning↗

GeoAI Advances in Specific Landform Mapping

Landform mapping (also referred to as geomorphology or geomorphometry) can be divided into two domains: general and specific (Evans 2012). Whereas general landform mapping categorizes all elements of the study area into landform classes, such as ridges, valleys, peaks, and depressions, the mapping of specific landforms requires the delineation (even if fuzzy) of individual landforms. The former is mainly driven by physical properties such as elevation, slope, and curvature. The latter, however, must consider the cognitive (human) reasoning that discriminates individual landforms in addition to these physical properties (Arundel and Sinha 2018). Both mapping forms are important. General geomorphometry is needed to understand geological and ecological processes and as boundary layer input to climate and environmental models. Specific geomorphometry supports such activities as disaster management and recovery, emergency response, transportation, and navigation. In the United States, individual landforms of interest are named in the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Geographic Names Information System, a point dataset captured specifically to digitize geographic names from the USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection (HTMC). Named landform extent is represented only by the name placement in the HTMC. Recent work has investigated CNN-based deep learning methods to capture these extents in machine-readable form. These studies first relied on physical properties (Arundel et al. 2020) and then included the HTMC as a band in RGB images in limited testing (Arundel et al. 2023). Results from the HTMC dataset surpassed those using just physical properties and using the HTMC alone performed best due to the hillshading and elevation (contour) data incorporated into the topographic maps. However, results fell short of an operational capacity to map all named landforms in the United States. Thus, our current work expands upon past research by focusing on the HTMC and physical information as inputs and the named landform label extents. Specifically, we propose to leverage pre-trained foundation models for segmentation and optical character recognition (OCR) models to jointly map landforms in the United States. Our approach aims to bridge the disparities among the independent information sources to facilitate informed decision-making. The modeling pipeline performs (1) segmentation using the physical information and (2) information extraction using OCR, in parallel. Then a computer vision approach merges the two branches into a labeled segmentation.

machine learning↗

pyflowline: a mesh-independent river network generator for hydrologic models

River networks are crucial in hydrologic and Earth system models. Accurately representing river networks in spatially distributed hydrologic models requires considering the model's spatial discretization and computational mesh. However, current methods of generating river networks for hydrologic models do not typically support unstructured meshes. Unstructured meshes offer numerous advantages over traditional, structured meshes. To overcome this limitation, we developed PyFlowline, a Python package that generates mesh-independent river networks. With PyFlowline, hydrologic modelers can generate conceptual river networks and their topological relationships for both structured and unstructured meshes.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗

ELAS - A geobased information system that is transferable to several computers

In the early years of remote sensing, emphasis was placed on the processing and analysis of data from a single multispectral sensor, such as the Landsat Multispectral Scanner System (MSS). However, in connection with attempts to use the data for resource management, it was realized that many deficiencies existed in single data sets. A need was established to geographically reference the MSS data and to register with it data from disparate sources. Technological transfer activities have required systems concepts that can be easily transferred to computers of different types in other organizations. ELAS (Earth Resources Laboratory Applications Software), a geographically based information system, was developed to meet the considered needs. ELAS accepts data from a variety of sources. It contains programs to geographically reference the data to the Universal Transverse Mercator grid. One of the primary functions of ELAS is to produce a surface cover map.

Whitley, S. L.↗

Modeling Electric Vehicle Charging Station Siting Suitability with a Focus on Equity

As adoption of electric vehicles increases, the infrastructure to charge them must keep pace. Determining where to add new charging infrastructure is a complex process subject to many factors, including electrical service availability, vehicle dwell time, the type(s) of drivers and vehicles the stations will serve, traffic levels and timing, and land ownership. In addition, advancing social equity is a current priority of federal efforts to invest in electric vehicle charging infrastructure. Conducting Multi-criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) within Argonne’s Energy Zones Mapping Tool (EZMT) is a useful method for analyzing many of the factors that influence how suitable a location is for potentially adding new charging infrastructure, and we show how equity metrics can be included in the analysis. However, data limitations impose challenges to using MCDA to evaluate and prioritize locations. We use three examples to demonstrate how to use publicly available data and MDCA to analyze different siting objectives. Each example starts with defining a specific objective and ends with how to use the results to identify specific potential locations that could be investigated further. This analysis demonstrates how interested stakeholders can use the EZMT to run the example MCDA models defined in this study, modify them to suit their needs, or create new MCDA models.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗

Hybrid Floating Solar Photovoltaics-Hydropower Systems: Benefits and Global Assessment of Technical Potential

Floating solar photovoltaics (FPV) is an emerging, and increasingly viable, application of photovoltaics (PV) in which systems are sited directly on waterbodies. Despite growing market interest, FPV system deployment is nascent, and potential adopters remain concerned about the technology, the benefits it offers, the advantages to pairing it in hybrid systems (such as with hydropower), and how to analyze technical potential. To support decision making, we provide a review of associated benefits of hybrid FPV-hydropower system operation and a novel, geospatial approach to assess the global technical potential of these systems employing publicly available, global datasets. We identify significant potential globally for FPV hybridized with hydropower ranging from 3.0?TW to 7.6?TW (4,251?TWh to 10,616?TWh annual generation), based on the assumptions made. We detail operational benefits that these hybrid systems may provide that could be quantified in future modeling and/or analyses of existing or planned hybrid systems.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗

Evaluating the Interplay between Trajectory Segmentation and Mode Inference Error

Travel behavior changes are essential to transportation decarbonization. Travel diaries, consisting of sequences of trips between places, are typically used to instrument human travel behavior. However, these diaries are only as accurate as the underlying methods used to construct them. Travel diary algorithms have been a popular research topic since the advent of Global Positioning System tracking surveys. These algorithms have typically been validated using prompted recall of presegmented trips, thus disregarding the continuity of mode inference. Phone operating systems have adopted battery-conserving techniques, but the resulting data collection errors have not been studied extensively. We introduce a framework to evaluate the accuracy of trip length computations and mode inference by analyzing continuous mode-segmented trajectories for groups of trips. We then use the framework to identify the input data quality and the impact of postprocessing. Our primary inputs to this evaluation are MobilityNet, a public dataset containing information from three artificial timelines covering 15 different travel modes, and sample open-source travel diary creation algorithms from the OpenPATH project. Our framework concretely shows that the variance of the distance error drops from (0.217, 0.0848) to (o.011, 0.0407) (Android, iOS) after postprocessing. Similarly, the weighted F-scores for mode inference increase from (0.25, 0.29) to (0.60, 0.74) (iOS, Android) between random forest and geographic information system-based models. We hope that this standardized method will be adapted to evaluate other, potentially proprietary, travel diary algorithms. Finally, the results can be used to understand and improve the state of the art in the travel diary creation field.

33 ADVANCED PROPULSION SYSTEMS↗

Pelagic Habitat Analysis Module (PHAM) for GIS Based Fisheries Decision Support

We have assembled a system that integrates satellite and model output with fisheries data We have developed tools that allow analysis of the interaction between species and key environmental variables Demonstrated the capacity to accurately map habitat of Thresher Sharks Alopias vulpinus & pelagicus. Their seasonal migration along the California Current is at least partly driven by the seasonal migration of sardine, key prey of the sharks.We have assembled a system that integrates satellite and model output with fisheries data We have developed tools that allow analysis of the interaction between species and key environmental variables Demonstrated the capacity to accurately map habitat of Thresher Sharks Alopias vulpinus nd pelagicus. Their seasonal migration along the California Current is at least partly driven by the seasonal migration of sardine, key prey of the sharks.

geographic information system (GIS)↗