Vincent Ambrosia

California State University, Monterey Bay | CSUMB · School of Natural Sciences

The interdisciplinary International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation (2021 Impact Factor: 5.933) (ISSN 0303-2434) is currently running a special issue entitled Earth Observation for Heritage Documentation. As acting guest editors for this special issue, we kindly invite you to consider submitting a manuscript. The UNESCO Worl...

Decades of successful active fire mapping from space, have led to global informational products of growing importance to scientific community and operational agencies. In contrast, detecting fires from space faster than current conventional capabilities in the continental U.S. has not been considered attainable, except in remote, sparsely populated...

This reports the preliminary results of a multidisciplinary project conducted at the NASA Ames Research Center (ARC) involving a number of student interns over the summer of 2014. The project had a goal of applying rapid prototyping techniques including 3D printing to unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), and demonstrate that surplus UAS could be repurp...

As government agencies around the globe strive to improve their disaster monitoring capabilities and speed response and recovery efforts, requirements for more accurate and safer data collection mean that Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) are being examined more closely for their potential roles in safely gathering data over those events. Wildfires are...

Developed as a quantitative measurement of fire intensity, fire radiative power (FRP) and the potential applications to smoke plume injection heights, are currently limited by the pixel resolution of a satellite sensor. As a result, this study, the first in a two-part series, develops a new sub-pixel-based calculation of fire radiative power (FRPf)...

Developed as a quantitative measurement of fire intensity, fire radiative power (FRP) and the potential applications to smoke plume injection heights, are currently limited by the pixel resolution of a satellite sensor. As a result, this study, the first in a two-part series, develops a new sub-pixel-based calculation of fire radiative power (FRPf)...

Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) have evolved rapidly over the past decade driven primarily by military uses, and have begun finding application among civilian users for earth sensing reconnaissance and scientific data collection purposes. Among UAS, promising characteristics are long flight duration, improved mission safety, flight repeatability du...

The primary factors needed to manage disaster events are time-critical geospatial information on the event occurrence and presentation of that information in an easily manageable, collaborative/interactive geospatial decision-support and visualization environment. In this chapter, we describe the development, integration, and use of an unmanned air...

Between 2006 and 2010, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the US Forest Service flew 14 unmanned airborne system (UAS) sensor missions, over 57 fires in the western US. The missions demonstrated the capabilities of a UAS platform (NASA Ikhana UAS), a multispectral sensor (autonomous modular sensor (AMS)), onboard processing an...

Between 2004 and 2010, the Wildfire Research and Applications Partnership (WRAP), a joint NASA / US Forest Service project, matured, demonstrated and transitioned innovative technologies and capabilities for real-time information data delivery to Incident Management Teams on wildland fires in the United States. The capabilities included the develop...

There are few examples where remote sensing is incorporated seamlessly into all stages of the emergency management cycle. To achieve this, a collaborative effort is required from emergency managers, policy planners, and remote sensing technical staff that may not always be co-located, or even working for the same organisation. Remotely sensed image...

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The seven papers in this special issue are grouped into five categories: UAV platforms and platform systems; UAV sensors and sensor systems; UAV data processing; UAV telemetry; and UAV applications.

Disaster management planning is structured around the disaster management cycle model. The cycle consists of four stages – reduction, readiness, response and recovery. Remotely sensed data can provide a valuable source of information at each of these stages, helping to understand spatial phenomena, and providing scientists and authorities with obje...

Detection of active wildfires requires data sources with comprehensive spatial coverage and high temporal frequency. In practice, this means that regional and global scale models of wildfire emissions must rely on moderate resolution satellites, with nominal resolutions between 500 meters and 4 kilometers. These resolutions are, at best, of the sam...

In 2007, the United States experienced one of the most severe fire seasons on record with 110,237 fires (wildfires, prescribed, and management fires) burning 12,899,948 acres of land [1]. The suppression and damage costs of those fires exceeded one-billion dollars (US). Fires have wide ranging implications for ecological composition, climatic impac...

This paper describes work being performed under a NASA Earth Science Technology Office grant to develop a modular Sensor Web architecture based on Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards, which enables discovery and generic tasking capability for sensors, both space-based and insitu. A series of increasingly complex demonstrations have been deve...

®UAS over wildland fires in the western United States. The mission plan required interaction with the FAA to ensure safe operations in the National Air Space (NAS) and concurrently meet science mission objectives . The mission plans called for access to large area of the western US NAS to image wildfires during the peak US wildfires season . Plans...

The environmental and health effects of wildfires are discussed. The monitoring of wildfires from aircraft using remote sensing techniques is reviewed. A future autonomous aerial observing system for fire monitoring is described.

The UAV Western States Fire Mission is a follow-on to the highly successful UAV FiRE Project. The mission will employ the high-altitude / long-duration capabilities of the General Atomics ALTAIR™ UAV as an instrument platform for improved sensor data collection over wildfires across the Western US. This mission is currently planned for initial demo...

NASA-Ames and the US Forest Service were recently funded to explore cutting edge technologies in fire imaging, telemetry, data / information integration, and UAV platform demonstrations to facilitate a "technology adaptation" and integration mechanism into the fire management community. The collaborative effort will involve participation from organ...

Project FiRE (First Response Experiment), a disaster management technology demonstration, was performed in 2001. The experiment demonstrated the use of a thermal multispectral scanning imager, integrated on an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), a satellite uplink/downlink image data telemetry system, and near-real-time geo-rectification of the resultan...

Disasters are costly both in human life and loss of homes. Yearly, these disasters result in 133,000 deaths and 140 million homeless worldwide. Current technology for monitoring fires has relied on instrument designs that are 15 to 20 years old; these systems are large, heavy, and usually have not been designed for fire characterization and mapping...

NASA-Ames Research Center, in collaboration with General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc. has been developing real-time data acquisition and information delivery systems employing uninhabited aerial vehicle (UAV) technology for disaster mitigation and assessment demonstrations. Working in conjunction with the US Forest Service, a disaster communi...

Worldwide, 70 major disasters requiring international assistance occur each year. These disasters result in 133,000 deaths, 140 million homeless, and $440 billion in property damage. In the last decade, U.S. property loss has averaged $54 billion per year. Obviously, disasters are expensive to manage and they result in destruction to homes and busi...

Among the most important short-term dynamic biological processes are diurnal changes in canopy water relations. Plant regulation of water transport through stomatal openings affects other gaseous transport processes, often dramatically decreasing photosynthetic fixation of carbon dioxide during periods of water stress. Water stress reduces stomatal...

A disaster mitigation feasibility study, entitled 'WILDFIRE,' was initiated in 1997. Project WILDFIRE demonstrated the feasibility of integrating civil and commercial communications and information technology to provide operational resources to firefighters attacking wildland fires. The demonstration of various technologies occurred during an actua...

Early detection of plant stress has always been a priority in forestry and agriculture. Identifying and treating problems increases both food and fiber production as well as making the most of scarce resources. In the past, farmers, foresters, and gardeners have relied upon expensive electronic and/or photographic systems to detect plant stress pro...

The development of hyperspectral imaging sensors allows extraction of spectral data from remotely sensed image data sets. This capability is of particular significance for productive littoral oceanic waters, which commonly have strong optical signals due to high concentrations of photosynthetic organisms such as phytoplankton. Remote sensing of oce...

The Airborne Infrared Disaster Assessment System (AIRDAS) is a four-channel scanner designed and built at NASA-Ames for the specific task of supporting research and applications on fire impacts on terrestrial and atmospheric processes and also of serving as a vital instrument in the assessment of natural and man-induced disasters. The system has be...

Visual and derivative analyses of AVIRIS spectral data can be used to detect algal accessory pigments in aquatic communities. This capability extends the use of remote sensing for the study of aquatic ecosystems by allowing detection of taxonomically significant pigment signatures which yield information about the type of algae present. Such inform...

Remotely sensed estimations of regional and global emissions from biomass combustion have been used to characterize fire behavior, determine fire intensity, and estimate burn area. Highly temporal, low resolution satellite data have been used to calculate estimates of fire numbers and area burned. These estimates of fire activity and burned area ha...

During and following the 1988 Yellowstone National Park wildfires, airborne remotely sensed data were collected in order to characterize various vegetative components, fire front movements and bum intensities. ER-2 derived Thematic Mapper Simulator (TMS) data were used in conjunction with water sampling and chemistry analysis to determine fire inte...

A simple method for enhancing the spatial and spectral resolution of disparate data sets is presented. Two data sets, digitized aerial photography at a nominal spatial resolution 3,7 meters and TMS digital data at 24.6 meters, were coregistered through a bilinear interpolation to solve the problem of blocky pixel groups resulting from rectification...

Aircraft and satellite systems yield wide-area views, providing total coverage of affected areas. System developed for use aboard aircraft includes digital scanner that records data in 12 channels. Transmits data to ground station for immediate use in fighting fires. Enables researchers to estimate gaseous and particulate emissions from fires. Prov...

An overview is presented of the effects of the wildfires that occurred in the Yellowstone National Park during 1988 and the techniques employed to combat these fires with the use of remote sensing. The fire management team utilized King-Air and Merlin aircraft flying night missions with a thermal IR line-scanning system. NASA-Ames Research Center a...

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Using smoke samples collected during low-level helicopter flights, the mixing ratios of CO2, CO, CH4, total nonmethane hydrocarbons, H2, and N2O over burning chaparral in southern California and over a burning boreal forest site in northern Ontario, Canada, were determined. Carbon dioxide-normalized emission ratios were determined for each trace ga...

The NASA Ames Ecosystem Science and Technology Branch and the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases are conducting research to detect Rift Valley fever (RVF) vector habitats in eastern Africa using active and passive remote-sensing. The normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) calculated from Landsat TM and SPOT data is u...

Particulate emission from a 400-acre prescribed chaparral fire in the San Dimas Experimental Forest was investigated by collecting smoke aerosol on Teflon and glass-fiber filters from a helicopter, and using SEM and EDAX to study the features of the particles. Aerosol particles ranged in size from about 0.1 to 100 microns, with carbon, oxygen, magn...

Biomass combustion plays an important role in the earth's biogeochemical cycling. The monitoring of wildfires and their associated variables at global scales is feasible and can lead to predictions of the influence of combustion on biogeochemical cycling and tropospheric chemistry. Remote sensing data collected during the 1985 California wildfire s...

Smoke-plume gas samples were collected at altitudes from 35-670 m above the ground over the San Dimas Experimental Forest during a 400-acre prescribed chaparral fire. Mean emission ratios relative to CO2 for CO, H2, CH4, and total nonmethane hydrocarbons were lower than previous values obtained for large biomass-burning field experiments. Compariso...

Two complementary sensors, the DAEDALUS DEI-1260 Multispectral Scanner aboard the NASA U-2 aircraft and the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer aboard National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration orbiting satellites were tested for their applicability in monitoring and predicting parameters such as fire location, temperature and rate...

Remotely sensed data from forested landscapes contain information on both cover type and structure. Structural properties include crown closure, basal area, leaf area index, and tree size. Cover type and structure together are useful variables for designing forest volume inventories. The potential of Thematic Mapper Simulator (TMS) data for sensing...

Per-pixel maximum likelihood digital classification and photo interpretation of Thematic Mapper Simulator (TMS) composited images for a managed conifer forest were used to evaluate both land cover and forest structure characteristics. TMS channels 4, 7, 5 and 3, which were found to be optimal for forest vegetation analysis, used the full range of t...

The feasibility of using LANDSAT digital data in conjunction with topographic data to delineate commercial forests by stand size and crown closure in the Tanana River basin of Alaska was tested. A modified clustering approach using two LANDSAT dates to generate an initial forest type classification was then refined with topographic data. To further...

Digital image classification techniques were used to classify land cover/resource information in the Tanana River Basin of Alaska. Portions of four scenes of LANDSAT digital data were analyzed using computer systems at Ames Research Center in an unsupervised approach to derive cluster statistics. The spectral classes were identified using the IDIMS...

Imaging spectrometers or "Hyperspectral Sensors" simultaneously collect spectral data as both images and as individual spectra. A broad range of techniques have been examined, refined, and put into operational practice for analysis of geologic problems. This paper describes a successful geologic case history using an end- to-end approach on Airborn...

Airborne remotely sensed data were collected and analyzed during and following the 1988 Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE) fires in order to character-ize the fire front movements, burn intensities and various vegetative components of selected watersheds. Remotely sensed data were used to categorize the burn intensities as: severely burned, modera...