The objective of this proposal is to acquire new equipment, software, and technical support to facilitate the incorporation of remote sensing into a global integrated environmental assessment framework. We aim to expand the computing capacity of the Laboratory of Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Systems at the University of New Hampshire. The proposed extension will substantially increase the capacity of the UNH laboratory, and enable manipulation and processing of multiple, high volume remote sensing data from existing satellites (e.g., La ndsat TM, AVHRR), soon-to-be-launched satellites TRMM, EOS AM-1 (e.g. MODIS, MIS R, MOPITT), and other platforms.
The computing facility will primarily serve a collaborative integrated environmental assessment effort involving researchers at three institutions: the Institute for Earth, Oceans and Space Studies at the University of New Hampshire, the Ecosystems Center of the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Center for Global Change Science (IGCS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The joint UNH, MBL and MIT effort will focus on the incorporation of a variety of remote sensing products into the Integrated Global System Model (IGSM) for climate change science and policy analysis. This synthesis effort cuts across many disciplines, including atmospheric chemistry, terrestrial ecology, and socioeconomics (Fig. 1, 2), and nearly every model component can be evaluated or driven by remote sensing. The effort to integrate remote sensing with the IGSM is multifaceted and ambitious, but it is limited primarily by our ability to store, manipulate, and visualize the data, and therefore the facility upgrade we propose will enable new research.
In supporting our effort at the global scale, the enhanced capacity will also be used to support other ongoing interdisciplinary field and modeling works in land use and land cover change, biogeochemistry, hydrology, atmospheric chemistry, and climate change at local and regional scales. At the site level, MBL and UNH are currently involved in the NSF-funded Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) program (Harvard forest site in Massachusetts, Hubbard Brook forest site in New Hampshire, Arctic Tundra site in Alaska), and the NSF-funded Land Margin Ecosystems Research (LMER) program (Plum Island Sound site in Massachusetts). At the regional scale, MBL and UNH have focused on South America (e.g., NASA Landsat Pathfinder), and have proposed further Amazonia research (NASA LBA).
In this proposal, we will discuss the potential for synthesis of current and future remote sensing data into the global integrated assessment model (IGSM). Most disciplinary subcomponents will have different data processing needs, depending on the level of on-site processing, the number of data layers, the spatial and temporal characteristics of the data (including, e.g., the interference of clouds) and the spatial and temporal resolution of the model component. In the following description (Section B) we outline seven tasks associated with this effort, focusing on how we need to extend our current capacity to complete the work . Finally, in Section C, we present our vision of the state-of-the-art equipment and support upgrade for the UNH laboratory that is responsive to the needs of the IGSM work, but that will enhance the capability of other, closely related research efforts.