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At least 577 records · Page 32

Experiment Design and Visualization Techniques for an X-59 Low-boom Variability Study

This presentation outlines the design of experiments approach and data visualization techniques for a simulation study of sonic booms from NASA’s X-59 supersonic aircraft. The X-59 will soon be flown over communities across the contiguous USA as it produces a low-loudness sonic boom, or low-boom. Survey data on human perception of low-booms will be collected to support development of potential future commercial supersonic aircraft noise regulatory standards. The macroscopic atmosphere plays a critical role in the loudness of sonic booms. The extensive sonic boom simulation study presented herein was completed to assess climatological, geographical, and seasonal effects on the variability of the X-59’s low-boom loudness and noise exposure region size in order to inform X-59 community test planning. The loudness and extent of the noise exposure region make up the “sonic boom carpet.” Two spatial and temporal resolutions of atmospheric input data to the simulation were investigated. A Fast Flexible Space-Filling Design was used to select the locations across the USA for the two spatial resolutions. Analysis of simulated X-59 low-boom loudness data within a regional subset of the northeast USA was completed using a bootstrap forest to determine the final spatial and temporal resolution of the countrywide simulation study. Atmospheric profiles from NOAA’s Climate Forecast System Version 2 database were used to generate over one million simulated X-59 carpets at the final selected 138 locations across the USA. Effects of aircraft heading, season, geography, and climate zone on low-boom levels and noise exposure region size were analyzed. Models were developed to estimate loudness metrics throughout the USA for X-59 supersonic cruise overflight, and results were visualized on maps to show geographical and seasonal trends. These results inform regulators and mission planners on expected variations in boom levels and carpet extent from atmospheric variations. Understanding potential carpet variability is important when planning community noise surveys using the X-59.

X-59↗

Neighborhood Keeper

Neighborhood Keeper is a collective defense and community-wide visibility solution that provides a more effective industrial cyber defense by sharing threat intelligence at machine-speed across industries and geographic regions.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗

Distributed Wind Energy Futures Study

To better understand distributed wind opportunities in the United States, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) National Renewable Energy Laboratory explored cost, performance, and valuation benchmarks necessary for distributed wind to achieve widespread commercial viability in the United States by 2035. Building on DOE's prior benchmark report "Assessing the Future of Distributed Wind: Opportunities for Behind-the-Meter Projects", the new Distributed Wind Futures Study employs higher-resolution data and new modeling techniques to highlight geographic trends in technical and economic potential and to compare the cost and performance of distribution-connected, megawatt-scale wind applications (referred to as "front-of-the-meter" applications) and behind-the-meter systems, thereby informing the case for investment. The report identifies the best locations and sectors for behind-the-meter and front-of-the-meter applications and provides data to inform the trade-offs consumers face when deciding between distributed wind and solar photovoltaic (PV).

17 WIND ENERGY↗

Distributed Wind Energy Futures Study [Slides]

To better understand distributed wind opportunities in the United States, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) National Renewable Energy Laboratory explored cost, performance, and valuation benchmarks necessary for distributed wind to achieve widespread commercial viability in the United States by 2035. Building on DOE's prior benchmark report "Assessing the Future of Distributed Wind: Opportunities for Behind-the-Meter Projects", the new Distributed Wind Futures Study employs higher-resolution data and new modeling techniques to highlight geographic trends in technical and economic potential and to compare the cost and performance of distribution-connected, megawatt-scale wind applications (referred to as "front-of-the-meter" applications) and behind-the-meter systems, thereby informing the case for investment. The report identifies the best locations and sectors for behind-the-meter and front-of-the-meter applications and provides data to inform the trade-offs consumers face when deciding between distributed wind and solar photovoltaic (PV).

17 WIND ENERGY↗

Tools and Techniques for Measuring and Improving Grid Performance

This viewgraph presentation provides information on NASA's geographically dispersed computing resources, and the various methods by which the disparate technologies are integrated within a nationwide computational grid. Many large-scale science and engineering projects are accomplished through the interaction of people, heterogeneous computing resources, information systems and instruments at different locations. The overall goal is to facilitate the routine interactions of these resources to reduce the time spent in design cycles, particularly for NASA's mission critical projects. The IPG (Information Power Grid) seeks to implement NASA's diverse computing resources in a fashion similar to the way in which electric power is made available.

Biswas, Rupak↗

Development of an airborne laser bathymeter

An airborne laser depth sounding system was built and taken through a complete series of field tests. Two green laser sources were tried: a pulsed neon laser at 540 nm and a frequency-doubled Nd:YAG transmitter at 532 nm. To obtain a depth resolution of better than 20 cm, the pulses had a duration of 5 to 7 nanoseconds and could be fired up to at rates of 50 pulses per second. In the receiver, the signal was detected by a photomultiplier tube connected to a 28 cm diameter Cassegrainian telescope that was aimed vertically downward. Oscilloscopic traces of the signal reflected from the sea surface and the ocean floor could either be recorded by a movie camera on 35 mm film or digitized into 500 discrete channels of information and stored on magnetic tape, from which depth information could be extracted. An aerial color movie camera recorded the geographic footprint while a boat crew of oceanographers measured depth and other relevant water parameters. About two hundred hours of flight time on the NASA C-54 airplane in the area of Chincoteague, Virginia, the Chesapeake Bay, and in Key West, Florida, have yielded information on the actual operating conditions of such a system and helped to optimize the design. One can predict the maximum depth attainable in a mission by measuring the effective attenuation coefficient in flight. This quantity is four times smaller than the usual narrow beam attenuation coefficient. Several square miles of a varied underwater landscape were also mapped.

Kim, H., H.↗

GraphAlign: Graph-Enabled Machine Learning for Seismic Event Filtering

This report summarizes results from a 2 year effort to improve the current automated seismic event processing system by leveraging machine learning models that can operated over the inherent graph data structure of a seismic sensor network. Specifically, the GraphAlign project seeks to utilize prior information on which stations are more likely to detect signals originating from particular geographic regions to inform event filtering. To date, the GraphAlign team has developed a Graphical Neural Network (GNN) model to filter out false events generated by the Global Associator (GA) algorithm. The algorithm operates directly on waveform data that has been associated to an event by building a variable sized graph of station waveforms nodes with edge relations to an event location node. This builds off of previous work where random forest models were used to do the same task using hand crafted features. The GNN model performance was analyzed using an 8 week IMS/IDC dataset, and it was demonstrated that the GNN outperforms the random forest baseline. We provide additional error analysis of which events the GNN model performs well and poorly against concluded by future directions for improvements.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗

Stochastic economic dispatch of wind power under uncertainty using clustering-based extreme scenarios

Operation of power systems with high penetrations of renewable energy sources requires tools for robust decision making under uncertainty. Stochastic economic dispatch and stochastic unit commitment are effective techniques for planning and operation under uncertainty, whose effectiveness depends on the cardinality and quality of the scenario set. Here, this article proposes a machine learning method using -means clustering for capturing relevant physical information from a large population of analog scenarios. Extreme scenario samples drawn from the clusters are used in a two-stage stochastic economic dispatch computation. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is assessed on a synthetic 200-bus system with a geographic footprint over Illinois, USA for four months from each season of WIND Toolkit data. The combination of -means clustering with importance sampling is shown to reduce the total operational cost by over 43% compared to sampling from populations based on heuristic clustering-based methods. Additionally, the variability in the mean cost is about 56% lower than the variability using Monte Carlo sampling. Moreover, the operational cost with the presented approach is shown to be close to the cost calculated based on a hindsight exact wind profile, signifying a highly accurate quantification of wind uncertainty by the presented -means clustering based sampling method.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

Multidate Landsat lake quality monitoring program

A unified package of files and programs has been developed to automate the multidate Landsat-derived analyses of water quality for about 3000 inland lakes throughout Wisconsin. A master lakes file which stores geographic information on the lakes, a file giving the latitudes and longitudes of control points for scene navigation, and a program to estimate control point locations and produce microfiche character maps for scene navigation are among the files and programs of the system. The use of ground coordinate systems to isolate irregular shaped areas which can be accessed at will appears to provide an economical means of restricting the size of the data set.

Fisher, L. T.↗

LANDSAT-4 World Reference System (WRS) users guide

A functional description of the new LANDSAT-4 World Reference System (WRS) with an overview of the main orbital parameters and instrument coverages is presented to provide the data user with the primary information required to understand LANDSAT-4 orbital characteristics, to effectively use the WRS indexing scheme, and to request specific geographic coverage on the desired observation dates.

Source record↗

Army technology development. IBIS query. Software to support the Image Based Information System (IBIS) expansion for mapping, charting and geodesy

The Image Based Information System (IBIS) has been under development at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) since 1975. It is a collection of more than 90 programs that enable processing of image, graphical, tabular data for spatial analysis. IBIS can be utilized to create comprehensive geographic data bases. From these data, an analyst can study various attributes describing characteristics of a given study area. Even complex combinations of disparate data types can be synthesized to obtain a new perspective on spatial phenomena. In 1984, new query software was developed enabling direct Boolean queries of IBIS data bases through the submission of easily understood expressions. An improved syntax methodology, a data dictionary, and display software simplified the analysts' tasks associated with building, executing, and subsequently displaying the results of a query. The primary purpose of this report is to describe the features and capabilities of the new query software. A secondary purpose of this report is to compare this new query software to the query software developed previously (Friedman, 1982). With respect to this topic, the relative merits and drawbacks of both approaches are covered.

Friedman, S. Z.↗

Aircraft scanner data availability via the version 0 Information Management System

As part of the Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) development, NASA and other government agencies have developed an operational prototype of the Information Management System (IMS). The IMS provides access to the data archived at the Distributed Active Archive Centers (DAAC's) that allows users to search through metadata describing the (image) data. Criteria based on sensor name or type, date and time, and geographic location are used to search the archive. Graphical representations of coverage and browse images are available to further refine a user's selection. previously, the EROS Data Center (EDC) DAAC had identified the Advanced SOlid-state Array Spectrometer (ASAS), Airborne Visible and infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS), NS-001, and Thermal Infrared Multispectral Scanner (TIMS) as precursor data sets similar to those the DAAC will handle in the Earth Observing System era. Currently, the EDC DAAC staff, in cooperation with NASA, has transcribed TIMS, NS-001, and Thematic Mapper Simulation (TMS) data from Ames Research Center and also TIMS data from Stennis Space Center. During the transcription process, the IMS metadata and browse images were created to populate the inventory at the EDC DAAC. These data sets are now available in the IMS and may be requested from the any of the DAAC's via the IMS.

Mah, G. R.↗

Version 4 of the CRU TS monthly high-resolution gridded multivariate climate dataset

CRU TS (Climatic Research Unit gridded Time Series) is a widely used climate dataset on a 0.5° latitude by 0.5° longitude grid over all land domains of the world except Antarctica. It is derived by the interpolation of monthly climate anomalies from extensive networks of weather station observations. Here we describe the construction of a major new version, CRU TS v4. It is updated to span 1901–2018 by the inclusion of additional station observations, and it will be updated annually. The interpolation process has been changed to use angular-distance weighting (ADW), and the production of secondary variables has been revised to better suit this approach. This implementation of ADW provides improved traceability between each gridded value and the input observations, and allows more informative diagnostics that dataset users can utilise to assess how dataset quality might vary geographically.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Variations in "Party Line" Information Importance Between Pilots of Difference Characteristics

The introduction of digital datalink communications into the air traffic control (ATC) system may cause a reduction of the situation awareness of flight crews due to the reduction of 'Party Line' Information (PLI) that can be overheard on the shared voice frequencies. A survey was distributed to determine current PLI use by pilots from different geographic regions, operational groups, experience levels, and aircraft equipage. Pilots indicated highest perceived importance for PLI during the phases of flight nearest the airport and lowest importance during cruise. Several specific traffic and weather information elements were identified as particularly important; traffic and weather information was also cited by pilots as information required for global situation awareness. Some variations in responses were found between pilots from different operational types.

Pritchett, Amy R.↗

Geographical correlation of TV and IR images obtained from weather satellites

The requirements on the accuracy of geographical correlation of TV and IR cloud cover images are determined by the objective of the analysis of the weather information contained in these images. In the operational analysis case, the correlation accuracy need not be high. Errors of several tens of kilometers in determining the location of the cloud formation contours are considered acceptable in this case. Such correlation must be provided in real image reception time. Scientific studies require accurate correlation of the cloud formation contours. The errors in determining their position should be commensurate with the imaging system resolution. The geometric aspects of developing methods and equipment for geographical correlation of television and infrared images of cloud cover taken from Meteor satellites are discussed.

Ziman, Y. L.↗

CARETS: A prototype regional environmental information system. Volume 9: Shore zone land use and land cover; Central Atlantic Regional Ecological Test Site

Anderson's 1972 United States Geological Survey classification in modified form was applied to the barrier-island coastline within the CARETS region. High-altitude, color-infrared photography of December, 1972, and January, 1973, served as the primary data base in this study. The CARETS shore zone studied was divided into six distinct geographical regions; area percentages for each class in the modified Anderson classification are presented. Similarities and differences between regions are discussed within the framework of man's modification of these landscapes. The results of this study are presented as a series of 19 maps of land-use categories. Recommendations are made for a remote-sensing system for monitoring the CARETS shore zone within the context of the dynamics of the landscapes studied.

Coastal ecosystems↗

New Human-Computer Interface Concepts for Mission Operations

The current climate of budget cuts has forced the space mission operations community to reconsider how it does business. Gone are the days of building one-of-kind control centers with teams of controllers working in shifts 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. Increasingly, automation is used to significantly reduce staffing needs. In some cases, missions are moving towards lights-out operations where the ground system is run semi-autonomously. On-call operators are brought in only to resolve anomalies. Some operations concepts also call for smaller operations teams to manage an entire family of spacecraft. In the not too distant future, a skeleton crew of full-time general knowledge operators will oversee the operations of large constellations of small spacecraft, while geographically distributed specialists will be assigned to emergency response teams based on their expertise. As the operations paradigms change, so too must the tools to support the mission operations team's tasks. Tools need to be built not only to automate routine tasks, but also to communicate varying types of information to the part-time, generalist, or on-call operators and specialists more effectively. Thus, the proper design of a system's user-system interface (USI) becomes even more importance than before. Also, because the users will be accessing these systems from various locations (e.g., control center, home, on the road) via different devices with varying display capabilities (e.g., workstations, home PCs, PDAS, pagers) over connections with various bandwidths (e.g., dial-up 56k, wireless 9.6k), the same software must have different USIs to support the different types of users, their equipment, and their environments. In other words, the software must now adapt to the needs of the users! This paper will focus on the needs and the challenges of designing USIs for mission operations. After providing a general discussion of these challenges, the paper will focus on the current efforts of creatin(y an effective USI for one specific suite of tools, SERS (The Spacecraft Emergency Response System), which has been built to enable lights-out operations. SERS is a Web-based collaborative environment that enables secure distributed fault management.

Fox, Jeffrey A.↗

AVHRR image navigation - Summary and review

The navigation of imagery from polar orbiting weather satellites includes the correction for geometric distortions due to earth shape/earth rotation, satellite orbit variations, and satellite attitude along with the resampling of the satellite image to a selected geographic map projection. The routine image navigation procedure also compensates for the distortion of the satellite imagery due to the nonlinear scanning of the sensor system. This paper reviews general methods for performing this image navigation, ranging from a method that assumes no orbital information and, thus, relies on nominal orbital parameter values and image corrections computed by matching ground control points (GCPs), to a method that uses high-quality satellite ephemeris data to make the correction with a limited number of GCPs. A procedure to optimize the image navigation by using a spatial remapping, or interpolation, is introduced and outlined. Recommendations are made for people interested in the processing of AVHRR imagery.

Emery, William J.↗