—Lancaster Farming, Saturday, August 12, 1972
18
Penn Staters Use Satellite for Flood Study
The “high-water mark” of the
Great Flood of ‘72 may be known
sooner than expected, if the
NASA Earth Resources
Technology Satellite (ERTS)
launched recently from Van
denberg Air Force Base does its
job.
Obtaining data on the flood
was not programmed into the
NASA package, but a group of
Penn State scientists and
engineers have been planning for
two years to use the sensor
satellite to get information on a
particular portion of Penn
sylvania.
That portion happens to
coincide with the heart of the
flood-ravaged region: the
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Test equipment and facilities,
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Build your own
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Employ computers to digest a host of information?
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Don’t take our word though
try a little research yourself,
try PIONEER
ELMER M. SHREINER
Susquehanna River Basin.
The polar orbit of the satel
lite will bring the payload
optical and eletronic sensing
cameras—over the Basin
once every eighteen days.
“If we’re lucky with the
weather,” says Dr. George
McMurtry, associate professor of
electrical engineering, “we
should be able to map the extent
of the flood-plain from data ob
tained on one pass of ERTS. This
knowledge, along with data on
ruined crops, sediment deposits,
etc., should be extremely
valuable to Pennsylvania and
other affected states as they
begin to plan for recovery.”
McMurtry and Dr. Gary
Petersen head a group of more
than twenty Penn State scientists
and engineers ready to begin
interpreting data transmitted by
the satellite, which is the first to
be flown with the exclusive
mission of collecting data on
earth resources. The Penn State
project is funded by a grant from
NASA.
“The areas that were flooded,”
says Petersen, associate
professor of soils, “are expected
to be visibly in terms of altered
reflectance; sediments left by
flood waters will yield a different
response than unaffected soils.
Also, vegetation killed by the
flood will likely reflect at dif
ferent levels than living, healthy
plants ”
The intent of the NASA ex
periment, in which several other
universities and government
agencies are participating, is to
obtain a resource survey of the
United States. Flights by
photographic planes, some of
which have already taken place,
are included in the massive
project
Its purpose is to identify
resources—and resource
deterioration —by remote sen
sing Lakes and rivers, strip
mine terrain, acid-mine
drainage, soil types, forests, oil
slicks, fish migration, and ocean
current behavior are some of the
features to be studied.
In effect, the project represents
feed mill
to test
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Specializing in DAIRY & HOG FEEDS
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manufacturing
the first stage in the compilation
of a “whole-earth catalogue,” a
basic reference manual showing
the pattern each known resource
yields when viewed from space.
Information obtained from the
remotely sensed data will be
made available to state agencies
such as the Department of En
vironmental Resources and the
Department of Transportation,
and to Federal agencies such as
the U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers and U.S. Department
of the Interior. This information
can then be used for resource
inventory, land use analysis, and
planning purposes.
The Penn State team awaiting
data from ERTS is one of the
largest and most diverse groups
ever assembled at the University
for a single research project; it
includes geophysicists,
hydrologists, foresters,
meteorologists, agricultural
economists, planning experts,
geologists, civil and electrical
engineers, plant pathologists and
several experts in photo
interpretation. This group is
called the Office for Remote
Sensing of Earth Resources
(ORSER) a division of the
University’s Space Science and
Engineering Laboratory, headed
by Paul Ebaugh, associate dean
of engineering.
The Penn State group will be
sent data from NASA receiving
stations in the form of both op
tical and digital read-out. The
data will be processed at the
Penn State Computation Center
and the scientists will then begin earth’s resources, and one of its
studying it in an effort to extend greatest disasters, look when
their understanding of how the remotely sensed.
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