Huemmrich and Campbell's work with ABoVE: Notes from Field
K. Fred Huemmrich and Petya Campbell (both 618/UMBC) returned to Alaska for summer fieldwork with the ABoVE campaign. Read about their findings and experiences in the Earth Observatory's Notes from the Field, "Boreal Summer."
Their work continues back in Maryland, setting up towers in various locations. There will be a tower in Edgewater, MD, in the spring, and a recent sensor was installed in a field in Greenbelt, MD, not too far from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. The towers can vary from 6 feet to 120 feet tall.
In further discussion with Dr. Huemmrich, we learned that another tower is set up in the Optimizing Production Inputs for Economic and Environmental Enhancement (OPE3) field in the USDA Beltsville Agricultural Research Center. This field is also just down the road from Goddard. This year it is in soybeans. Drs. Huemmrich and Campbell are testing out a new version of the instrument called a "NoX" (for Near IR box). These instruments break down the light reflected from the plants into hundreds of narrow spectral bands that cover the visible light that we can see and on into the infrared beyond what we can see. Drs. Huemmrich and Campbell are using it to collect data to help develop and test new algorithms for detecting crop biochemistry and productivity that can be applied to upcoming NASA missions like PACE and SBG.
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Posted: September 20, 2023, 10:14 AM
