It’s called CREATE or Center for Rapid Environmental Analysis and Terrain Evaluation, and with the aid of a $3.5 million grant from a series of federal appropriations supported by Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) and administered by NASA, the vision of providing useful data in real-time is finally going to happen for Earth and Planetary Sciences Associate Professor Louis Scuderi.
Through CREATE, Scuderi is looking to revolutionize the acquisition and distribution of real-time satellite digital imagery of New Mexico landscapes and those in surrounding regions of North America. The images in turn could aid in firefighting efforts, livestock managers in regard to vegetative change and by providing researchers data in real-time.
“It’s designed to access environmental satellites by producing digital imagery in near real-time when satellites pass over New Mexico,” said Scuderi. “The motivation behind CREATE is predicated on a set of problems. Under existing conditions, it takes weeks to months before the information from satellites reaches researchers. Second, I came from the private sector where we were able to obtain information in real-time. We were able to capture and process data while it was still current and of interest to the end user.
“For example, getting it (data) a month after a fire or a flood isn’t real helpful. If we provide the data in real-time, it could help firefighters. There’s not very many people outside the Department of Defense with the ability to capture and process data in real-time.”
The center has acquired complete satellite ground stations for the receipt of X-Band Direct Broadcast MODIS data from Aqua and Terra satellites and L-Band Direct Broadcast data from NOAA and other polar orbiting satellites. The center includes 4.5 and 1.5-meter satellite antennas, image processing hardware and software, 20 terabytes of data storage and archives, and web-based data distribution capabilities.
The ground stations will provide near real-time environmental data integrated with ancillary Geographic Information System (GIS) data in the CREATE computational facilities to provide rapid assessment of changing environmental conditions to state and Federal agencies in New Mexico and regions ranging from Central America on the south to southern Canada on the north and from the Atlantic Ocean on the east to the Pacific Ocean on the west. The facility was designed to access most existing satellites in orbit and also those going up in the future says Scuderi.
The data sets can improve the prediction of vegetative change in response to climate variability and change leading to higher quality ecosystem models in near real-time; improved response to fire events; providing data inputs to economic and sociologically robust water decision support systems; and helping to reduce response time to environmental disasters and hazards and rapid assessment of the potential threat posed by terrorist attacks.
“The data sets provided can be used to support existing and future planned decision support systems in hydrology for the New Mexico Office of the State Engineer, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the National Forest Service, the U.S. Natural Resource Conservation Service, and meteorology, ecology and climatology to the Bureau of Land Management,” said Scuderi. “The possibilities are endless. It’s so new and novel that everywhere we turn we find new data sets we can use and new applications that we can apply them to.”
Contact: Steve Carr, (505) 277-1821