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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 145 records · Page 8
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS1989

Observation of organized structure in turbulent flow within and above a forest canopy

Data obtained with seven triaxial sonic anemometer/thermometers and three Lyman-alpha hygrometers at an experimental site in Ontario, Canada reveal the coherent occurrence of ramp patterns of temperature and humidity at several levels within and above the deciduous forest considered. The ramps appear most clearly in the middle and upper portion of the forest, and near the top of the forest they are composed of a weak ejecting motion transporting warm and/or moist air out of the forest, followed by strong sweeps of cool and/or dry air penetrating into the canopy. In the middle and upper parts of the canopy, the sweeps are found to conduct a large proportion of the overall transfer between the forest and the lower atmosphere, with a lesser contribution from ejections.

Gao, W.↗
NASA NTRS2007

Advanced NASA Earth Science Mission Concept for Vegetation 3D Structure, Biomass and Disturbance

Carbon in forest canopies represents about 85% of the total carbon in the Earth's aboveground biomass (Olson et al., 1983). A major source of uncertainty in global carbon budgets derives from large errors in the current estimates of these carbon stocks (IPCC, 2001). The magnitudes and distributions of terrestrial carbon storage along with changes in sources and sinks for atmospheric C02 due to land use change remain the most significant uncertainties in Earth's carbon budget. These uncertainties severely limit accurate terrestrial carbon accounting; our ability to evaluate terrestrial carbon management schemes; and the veracity of atmospheric C02 projections in response to further fossil fuel combustion and other human activities. Measurements of vegetation three-dimensional (3D) structural characteristics over the Earth's land surface are needed to estimate biomass and carbon stocks and to quantify biomass recovery following disturbance. These measurements include vegetation height, the vertical profile of canopy elements (i.e., leaves, stems, branches), andlor the volume scattering of canopy elements. They are critical for reducing uncertainties in the global carbon budget. Disturbance by natural phenomena, such as fire or wind, as well as by human activities, such as forest harvest, and subsequent recovery, complicate the quantification of carbon storage and release. The resulting spatial and temporal heterogeneity of terrestrial biomass and carbon in vegetation make it very difficult to estimate terrestrial carbon stocks and quantify their dynamics. Vegetation height profiles and disturbance recovery patterns are also required to assess ecosystem health and characterize habitat. The three-dimensional structure of vegetation provides habitats for many species and is a control on biodiversity. Canopy height and structure influence habitat use and specialization, two fundamental processes that modify species richness and abundance across ecosystems. Accurate and consistent 3D measurements of forest structure at the landscape scale are needed for assessing impacts to animal habitats and biodiversity following disturbance.

Ranson, K. Jon↗
NASA NTRS1977

A plant canopy light absorption model with application to wheat

From the light absorption model the absorption of light in the photosynthetically active region of the spectrum was calculated for a Penjamo wheat crop for several situations including: (1) the percent absorption of the incident radiation by a canopy having a four layer structure; (2) the percent absorption of light by the individual layers within a four layer canopy and by the underlying soil; (3) the percent absorption of light by each vegetative canopy layer for variable sun angle; and (4) the cumulative solar energy absorbed by the developing wheat canopy as it progresses from a single layer through its growth stages to a three layer canopy. This calculation was also presented as a function of the leaf area index.

Chance, J. E.↗
NASA NTRS2012

Lidar Remote Sensing of Forests: New Instruments and Modeling Capabilities

Lidar instruments provide scientists with the unique opportunity to characterize the 3D structure of forest ecosystems. This information allows us to estimate properties such as wood volume, biomass density, stocking density, canopy cover, and leaf area. Structural information also can be used as drivers for photosynthesis and ecosystem demography models to predict forest growth and carbon sequestration. All lidars use time-in-flight measurements to compute accurate ranging measurements; however, there is a wide range of instruments and data types that are currently available, and instrument technology continues to advance at a rapid pace. This seminar will present new technologies that are in use and under development at NASA for airborne and space-based missions. Opportunities for instrument and data fusion will also be discussed, as Dr. Cook is the PI for G-LiHT, Goddard's LiDAR, Hyperspectral, and Thermal airborne imager. Lastly, this talk will introduce radiative transfer models that can simulate interactions between laser light and forest canopies. Developing modeling capabilities is important for providing continuity between observations made with different lidars, and to assist the design of new instruments. Dr. Bruce Cook is a research scientist in NASA's Biospheric Sciences Laboratory at Goddard Space Flight Center, and has more than 25 years of experience conducting research on ecosystem processes, soil biogeochemistry, and exchange of carbon, water vapor and energy between the terrestrial biosphere and atmosphere. His research interests include the combined use of lidar, hyperspectral, and thermal data for characterizing ecosystem form and function. He is Deputy Project Scientist for the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM); Project Manager for NASA s Carbon Monitoring System (CMS) pilot project for local-scale forest biomass; and PI of Goddard's LiDAR, Hyperspectral, and Thermal (G-LiHT) airborne imager.

Cook, Bruce D.↗
NASA NTRS1985

Understanding the Radiant Scattering Behavior of Vegetated Scenes

Knowledge of the physics of the scattering behavior of vegetation will ultimately serve the remote sensing and earth science community in many ways. For example, it will provide: (1) insight and guidance in developing new extraction techniques of canopy characteristics, (2) a basis for better interpretation of off-nadir satellite and aircraft data, (3) a basis for defining specifications of future earth observing sensor systems, and (4) a basis for defining important aspects of physical and biological processes of the plant system. The overall objective of the three-year study is to improve our fundamental understanding of the dynamics of directional scattering properties of vegetation canopies through analysis of field data and model simulation data. The specific objectives are to: (1) collect directional reflectance data covering the entire exitance hemisphere for several common vegetation canopies with various geometric structure (both homogeneous and row crop structures), (2) develop a scene radiation model with a general mathematical framework which will treat 3-D variability in heterogeneous scenes and account for 3-D radiant interactions within the scene, (3) conduct validations of the model on collected data sets, and (4) test and expand proposed physical scattering mechanisms involved in reflectance distribution dynamics by analyzing both field and modeling data.

Kimes, D. S.↗
NASA NTRS1986

Directional reflectance distributions of a hardwood and pine forest canopy

A hand-held radiometer with AVHRR bands 1 and 2 was used to measure the directional reflectance distributions for both a hardwood and a pine forest canopy from a helicopter platform; canopy characteristics were also measured on the ground. The reflectance distributions obtained are compared with the scattering behavior of agricultural and natural grassland canopies. In addition, the Kimes (1983) three-dimensional radiative transfer model is used to document the unique radiant transfers that occur in forest canopies in virtue of their geometric structure. Both the measurements and the model calculations show that dense forest canopy scattering is similar to that for crops and grasslands. Attention is given to the effects of sparse forest canopies.

Kimes, D. S.↗
NASA NTRS1999

Modeling Laser Altimeter Return Waveforms Over Complex Vegetation Using High-Resolution Elevation Data

The upcoming generation of laser altimeters record the interaction of emitted laser radiation with terrestrial surfaces in the form of a digitized waveform. We model these laser altimeter return waveforms as the sum of the reflections from individual surfaces within laser footprints, accounting for instrument-specific properties. We compare over 1000 modeled and recorded waveform pairs using the Pearson correlation. We show that we reliably synthesize the vertical structure information for vegetation canopies contained in a medium-large diameter laser footprint from a high-resolution elevation data set.

Blair, J. Bryan↗
NASA NTRS2012

Observing Changing Ecological Diversity in the Anthropocene

As the world enters the Anthropocene, the planet's environment is changing rapidly, putting critical ecosystem services at risk. Understanding and forecasting how ecosystems will change over the coming decades requires understanding the sensitivity of species to environmental change. The extant distribution of species and functional groups contains valuable information about the performance of different species in different environments. However, with high rates of environmental change, information inherent in ranges of many species will disappear, since that information exists only under quasi-equilibrium conditions. The information content of distributional data obtained now is greater than data obtained in the future. New remote sensing technologies can map chemical and structural traits of plant canopies and allow inference of trait and in many cases, species ranges. Current satellite remote sensing data can only produce relatively simple classifications, but new techniques have dramatically higher biological information content.

environmental changes↗
NASA NTRS2017

Patterns of Canopy and Surface Layer Consumption in a Boreal Forest Fire from Repeat Airborne Lidar

Fire in the boreal region is the dominant agent of forest disturbance with direct impacts on ecosystem structure, carbon cycling, and global climate. Global and biome-scale impacts are mediated by burn severity, measured as loss of forest canopy and consumption of the soil organic layer. To date, knowledge of the spatial variability in burn severity has been limited by sparse field sampling and moderate resolution satellite data. Here, we used pre- and post-fire airborne lidar data to directly estimate changes in canopy vertical structure and surface elevation for a 2005 boreal forest fire on Alaskas Kenai Peninsula. We found that both canopy and surface losses were strongly linked to pre-fire species composition and exhibited important fine-scale spatial variability at sub-30m resolution. The fractional reduction in canopy volume ranged from 0.61 in lowland black spruce stands to 0.27 in mixed white spruce and broad leaf forest. Residual structure largely reflects standing dead trees, highlighting the influence of pre-fire forest structure on delayed carbon losses from above ground biomass, post-fire albedo, and variability in understory light environments. Median loss of surface elevation was highest in lowland black spruce stands (0.18 m) but much lower in mixed stands (0.02 m), consistent with differences in pre-fire organic layer accumulation. Spatially continuous depth-of-burn estimates from repeat lidar measurements provide novel information to constrain carbon emissions from the surface organic layer and may inform related research on post-fire successional trajectories. Spectral measures of burn severity from Landsat were correlated with canopy (r = 0.76) and surface (r = -0.71) removal in black spruce stands but captured less of the spatial variability in fire effects for mixed stands (canopy r = 0.56, surface r = -0.26), underscoring the difficulty in capturing fire effects in heterogeneous boreal forest landscapes using proxy measures of burn severity from Landsat.

Alonzo, Michael↗
NASA NTRS1999

The Laser Vegetation Imaging Sensor (LVIS): A Medium-Altitude, Digitization-Only, Airborne Laser Altimeter for Mapping Vegetation and Topography

The Laser Vegetation Imaging Sensor (LVIS) is an airborne, scanning laser altimeter designed and developed at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. LVIS operates at altitudes up to 10 km above ground, and is capable of producing a data swath up to 1000 m wide nominally with 25 m wide footprints. The entire time history of the outgoing and return pulses is digitized, allowing unambiguous determination of range and return pulse structure. Combined with aircraft position and attitude knowledge, this instrument produces topographic maps with decimeter accuracy and vertical height and structure measurements of vegetation. The laser transmitter is a diode-pumped Nd:YAG oscillator producing 1064 nm, 10 nsec, 5 mJ pulses at repetition rates up to 500 Hz. LVIS has recently demonstrated its ability to determine topography (including sub-canopy) and vegetation height and structure on flight missions to various forested regions in the U.S. and Central America. The LVIS system is the airborne simulator for the Vegetation Canopy Lidar (VCL) mission (a NASA Earth remote sensing satellite due for launch in 2000), providing simulated data sets and a platform for instrument proof-of-concept studies. The topography maps and return waveforms produced by LVIS provide Earth scientists with a unique data set allowing studies of topography, hydrology, and vegetation with unmatched accuracy and coverage.

Blair, J. Bryan↗
NASA NTRS2017

High Ice Water Concentrations in the 19 August 2015 Coastal Mesoconvective System

During August 2015, NASA's DC-8 research aircraft was flown into High Ice Water Content (HIWC) events as part of a three-week campaign to collect airborne radar data and to obtain measurements from microphysical probes. Goals for this flight campaign included improved characterization of HIWC events, especially from an airborne radar perspective. This paper focuses on one of the flight days, in which a coastal mesoscale convective system (MCS) was investigated for HIWC conditions. The system appears to have been maintained by bands of convection flowing in from the Gulf of Mexico. These convective bands were capped by a large cloud canopy, which masks the underlying structure if viewed from an infrared sensing satellite. The DC-8 was equipped with an IsoKinetic Probe that measured ice concentrations of up to 2.3 g m(exp -3) within the cloud canopy of this system. Sustained measurements of ice crystals with concentrations exceeding 1 g m(exp -3) were encountered for up to ten minutes of flight time. Airborne Radar reflectivity factors were found to be weak within these regions of high ice water concentrations, suggesting that Radar detection of HIWC would be a challenging endeavor. This case is then investigated using a three-dimensional numerical cloud model. Profiles of ice water concentrations and radar reflectivity factor demonstrate similar magnitudes and scales between the flight measurements and model simulation. Also discussed are recent modifications to the numerical model's ice-microphysics that are based on measurements during the flight campaign. The numerical model and its updated ice-microphysics are further validated with a simulation of a well-known case of a supercell hailstorm measured during the Cooperative Convective Precipitation Experiment. Differences in HIWC between the continental supercell and the coastal MCS are discussed.

Proctor, Fred H.↗
NASA NTRS2018

Measurements of Parachute Dynamics in the World's Largest Wind Tunnel by Stereo Photogrammetry

Between 2012 and 2017, parachutes for four NASA Projects were tested in the 80- by 120-Ft test section of the National Full-Scale Aerodynamic Complex (NFAC) at NASA Ames Research Center. These projects were: (1) Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD); (2) Capsule Parachute Assembly System (CPAS, for Orion); (3) Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight, a Mars mission); and (4) Mars 2020. In all tests stereo photogrammetry was used to measure time-dependent positions of features on the canopies. For the LDSD and CPAS tests, where the purpose was to study the trade-off between stability and drag of different parachute designs, the pendulum motion of the canopies about the riser attachment point was measured by calibrated cameras in the diffuser. The CPAS test also included static measurements where the inflated parachutes were pulled to the side by a system of tethers. The Insight tests were structural qualification tests where each canopy was packed in a bag and launched from a mortar. Cameras in the diffuser measured the trajectory of the bag and the stripping of the bag from the canopy. The Mars 2020 test was a workmanship verification test where the canopies were either launched from a mortar or deployed from a sleeve stretched along the tunnel axis. The deployments were recorded from many directions by thirteen high-speed cameras distributed in the diffuser and test section. Photogrammetry was not planned; however, after a tunnel-related accident ended the test prematurely, photogrammetric measurements were bootstrapped from the images to support the accident investigations. This paper describes how the photogrammetry measurements were made in each test and presents typical results.

Schairer, Edward T.↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Fluid-Structure Interaction Simulations of the ASPIRE SR01 Supersonic Parachute

High-fidelity computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations have so far only played exploratory and supporting roles in the study and qualification of parachutes for planetary entry. The last few years have seen the maturation of coupled computational methods that are capable of modeling the complex fluid-structure interactions between a parachute canopy and the supersonic flow in the wake of an entry vehicle in flight conditions. One of the primary goals of these methods is to predict the peak opening load experienced by the parachute during inflation. The Launch, Ascent, and Vehicle Aerodynamics (LAVA)team is developing efficient, high-fidelity numerical methods to perform such challenging fluid-structure interaction simulations. A loose coupling approach is used to advance the solutions of a Cartesian ghost cell immersed boundary method CFD solver and a finite element computational structural dynamics (CSD) solver in space and time. The coupled solver is employed to simulate the ASPIRE SR01 flight test, where a build-to-print version of the Mars Science Laboratory parachute was inflated in supersonic conditions in the upper terrestrial atmosphere. The simulations conducted in the current paper predict a peak opening load that is within 10% of that from the flight test. Grid convergence with respect to the volume and structural domains is demonstrated, and less than 1% variation in the peak opening load is predicted between all grid resolutions.

ARMD↗
NASA NTRS1997

Coherent Effects in Microwave Backscattering Models for Forrest Canopies

In modeling forest canopies, several scattering mechanisms are taken into account: (1) volume scattering; (2) surface-volume interaction; and (3) surface scattering from forest floor. Depending on the structural and dielectric characteristics of forest canopies, the relative contribution of each mechanism in the total backscatter signal of an imaging radar can vary. In this paper, two commonly used first-order discrete scattering models, distorted born approximation (DBA) and radiative transfer (RT) are used to simulate the backscattered power received by polarimetric radars at P-, L-, and C-bands over coniferous and deciduous forests. The difference between the two models resides on the coherent effect in the surface-volume interaction terms. To demonstrate this point, the models are first compared based on their underlying theoretical assumptions and then according to simulation results over coniferous and deciduous forests. It is shown that by using the same scattering functions for various components of trees (i.e., leaf, branch, stem), the radiative transfer and distorted Born models are equivalent, except in low frequencies, where surface-volume interaction terms may become important, and the coherent contribution may be significant. In this case, the difference between the two models can reach up to 3 dB in both co-polarized and cross-polarized channels, which can influence the performance of retrieval algorithms.

Saatchi, Sasan S.↗
NASA NTRS1995

Coherent Effects in Microwave Backscattering Models for Forest Canopies

In modeling forest canopies, several scattering mechanisms are taken into account: 1) volume scattering, 2) surface-volume interaction, and 3) surface scattering from forest floor. Depending on the structural and dielectric characteristics of forest canopies, the relative contribution of each mechanism in the total backscatter signal of an imaging radar can vary. In this paper, two commonly used first order discrete scattering models, Distorted Born Approximation (DBA) and Radiative Transfer (RT) are used to simulate the backscattered power received by polarimetric radars at P-, L-, and C-bands over coniferous and deciduous forests. The difference between the two models resides on the coherent effect in the surface-volume interaction terms.

Microwave Backscattering Models↗
NASA NTRS1986

Analysis of forest structure using thematic mapper simulator data

The potential of Thematic Mapper Simulator (TMS) data for sensing forest structure information has been explored by principal components and feature selection techniques. In a survey of forest structural properties conducted for 123 field sites of the Sequoia National Park, the canopy closure could be well estimated (r = 0.62 to 0.69) by a variety of channel bands and band ratios, without reference to the forest type. Estimation of the basal area was less successful (r = 0.51 or less) on the average, but could be improved for certain forest types when data were stratified by floristic composition. To achieve such a stratification, individual sites were ordinated by a detrended correspondence analysis based on the canopy of dominant species. The analysis of forest structure in the Sequoia data suggests that total basal area can be best predicted in stands of lower density, and in younger even-aged managed stands.

Peterson, D. L.↗
NASA NTRS1982

Soybean canopy reflectance as a function of view and illumination geometry

The results of an experiment designed to characterize a soybean field by its reflectance at various view and illumination angles and by its physical and agronomic attributes are presented. Reflectances were calculated from measurements at four wavelength bands through eight view azimuth and seven view zenith directions for various solar zenith and azimuth angles during portions of three days. An ancillary data set consisting of the agronomic and physical characteristics of the soybean field is described. The results indicate that the distribution of reflectance from a soybean field is a function of the solar illumination and viewing geometry, wavelength and row direction, as well as the state of development of the canopy. Shadows between rows greatly affected the reflectance in the visible wavelength bands and to a lesser extent in the near infrared wavelengths. A model is proposed that describes the reflectance variation as a function of projected solar and projected viewing angles. The model appears to approximate the reflectance variations in the visible wavelength bands from a canopy with well defined row structure.

Bauer, M. E.↗
NASA NTRS1984

Development and evaluation of techniques for using combined microwave and optical image data for vegetation studies

Techniques for using combined image data from the Shuttle Imaging Radar (SIR-B) and the LANDSAT Thematic Mapper (TM) or Multispectral Scanner (MSS) for studies of irrigated crops, and boreal and deciduous forests are developed and evaluated. The effects of the structure and composition of crop canopies and soil surfaces on multiangle L-band HH (Horizontal polarization for transmission and reception) backscattering and on optical reflectance (in TM or MSS bands viewed at the nadir) are investigated. The relative accuracy of digital, calibrated SIR-B image data and LANDSAT TM or MSS image data is evaluated. Textural information extraction-techniques are developed for radar and optical image analysis.

Paris, J. F.↗