Remote Sensing

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

The course objective is to provide students the fundamentals of remote sensing and the knowledge and tools to collect, process, visualize, and analyze geospatial data to answer research questions in the earth and environmental sciences and to address national security and energy and climate policy issues. The course includes both lecture and practical laboratory sections with exams that cover both aspects. The course will be project oriented where the students write a research paper on a geoscience, environmental, or national security topic of their choice and present results to their peers at the end of the semester. Topics include remote sensing concepts such as the electromagnetic spectrum, net balance, atmospheric scattering, and image visualization and interpretation. We will discuss remote sensing instrumentation, collection processes, data and formats, and fundamental image processing. To prepare for final projects, earth and environmental science and national security geospatial analysis case studies will be discussed. The laboratory section of the course includes hands on digital image processing and data manipulation in remote sensing and geographic information systems software to enable geospatial analysis, geo-statistics, and generation of informative maps.