1999 EARTH SCIENCE VIDEOTAPES |
| |
Tape Title | Record ID | Date Produced | TRT: |
Synopsis |
| NASA TO BEGIN MEASURING WORLDÕS LARGEST TREES | G99-074 | 9/21/99 | 00:5:51 | A NASA research aircraft will fly over selected U.S. forests this month with an innovative laser instrument to find out for the first time just how much vegetation is in these forests. When launched into space next year aboard the NASA/University of Maryland Vegetation Canopy Lidar (VCL) satellite, this technology will create the first global maps of forest vegetation that scientists can use to monitor the health of forests and their capacity to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
|
TAPE CONTENTS: |
| ITEM (1): MAPPING THE FOREST CANOPY - FALSE COLOR - The same technology that mapped the topography of Mars will measure the height and amount of vegetation in California's sequoia forest as well as eastern U.S. forests in Maryland, North Carolina, and New Hampshire. The images will be similar to this one, taken last year from a fly-over of the Costa Rican rainforest. Red represents the tallest elevations and blue the lowest.
|
| ITEM (2): MAPPING THE FOREST CANOPY - TREE TEXTURE - Image of the Costa Rican rainforest illustrating elevation and vegetation taken by a LIDAR aircraft during a fly-over last year. It dissolves into a tree-colored image showing the potential of LIDAR to show three-dimensional images of the forest as well.
|
| ITEM (3): MAPPING THE TALL TREES - Animation depicting the LVIS instrument flown aboard a NASA C-130 aircraft. The new LVIS (laser vegetation imaging sensor) operates by sending pulses of energy to the Earth's surface, then analyzing the signal as the pulses bounce off of leaves, branches and the ground to reflect back to the LVIS. It is able to measure the height of the canopy and each tree within it, as well as measuring the amount of vegetation in the forests.
|
| ITEM (4): MAPPING MARS / ICE SHEETS / BEACHES - he same technology used in LVIS has been used to map the rugged surface of Mars, the El Nino driven changes in California Beaches, and dramatic changes in the Greenland Ice Sheets.
|
| ITEM (5): GLOBAL BIOMASS - When launched into space next year aboard the NASA/University of Maryland Vegetation Canopy Lidar (VCL) satellite, this technology will create the first global maps of forest vegetation that scientists can use to monitor the health of forests and their capacity to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This image of the global biosphere is from NASA's Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWiFS). Previous satellites have mapped vegetation area in great detail, but VCL will be the first to map the vertical dimension of a forest.
|