Welcome to
Geography 361 - Remote Sensing in Geosciences
and
Geography 651 - Remote Sensing for Geographical Analysis

The two courses, one at the undergraduate level and the other at the graduate level, provide an introduction to remote sensing to study the earth presented from a geographer's standpoint. More specifically, the courses are an introduction to the physics behind and technical issues surrounding the acquisition and utilization of remotely sensed airborne and satellite images for the study of physical and human landscapes. Techniques for analyzing and interpreting images for studying biological, geological, hydrological and oceanographic processes as well as human activities will be emphasized.

The overarching learning objective of the courses can be summarized as follows:

• Students will understand the basics of how electromagnetic energy enables remote sensing and be able to describe why different wavelength regions of the electromagnetic spectrum are useful for different types of remote sensing as well as explain why various portions of the electromagnetic spectrum cannot be used for remote sensing.
• Students will be able to explain the concepts of spatial, spectral, radiometric and temporal resolution and how they how they impact the selection of the most appropriate data source(s) for a particular analytical task. Students will also be able to compare and contrast current common sensors on the basis of these properties and explain if a sensor is useful for particular tasks.
• Students will be able to describe the basic elements of visual image analysis and will be able to interpret aerial photographs.
• Students will be able to extract basic quantities information from these including areas and heights of features as well explain the basic concepts underpinning of photogrammetry including parallax and orthorectification.
• Students will be able to describe spectral signatures and use this knowledge to explain how different wavelengths can successfully be used to differentiate between different land surface types.
• Students will be able to explain and perform fundamental digital image processing tasks including: georectification, radiometric preprocessing, band ratioing and supervised and unsupervised image classification.

I hope that you enjoy your class.

Dr. Klein

The image on the right is a true-color Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) image, acquired from data collected on October 12, 2001, displays the northwestern portion of the Ross Ice Shelf. You can see the large iceberg just to the north of Ross Island. This has prevented breakup of the sea ice in the vicinity of Ross Island which has affected penguin populations.