Landsats Aff

Disasters – Solvency

Landsats key to disaster prevention and management
Lebowitz 6/21 (Jonathan, Staff, USA Today, http://content.usatoday.com/communities/sciencefair/post/2011/06/satellite-programs-aid-emergency-management-teams-battling-arizona-wildfires-/1, accessed 7-3-11, JMB)

Multiple firefighting agencies are using imagery -- provided by federally funded Landsat 5 and 7, Aqua and Terra satellites -- to combat wildfires that continue to blaze across Arizona. The satellites capture images of the Earth's surface and then, using color enhancements, firefighters can identify different regions most susceptible to wildfire burning. In the images, burn scars are red, ongoing fires are bright red, vegetation is green, smoke is blue and bare ground is tan-colored. When the location of a wildfire is found, emergency managers can evacuate people in the path of the fire and pinpoint where water and firefighters need to go. "In addition to providing information used to map the susceptibility of the forests to wildfires, the satellites can also provide emergency management agencies with data to gauge the extent of damage that was done over burnt areas," says Jim Irons, Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) project scientist. Once a satellite has taken a photograph of the land after the wildfire has been contained, emergency managers can distinguish areas of land that have suffered extensive burning from those that remain intact. From this, officials can work to determine the cause of the wildfire and work towards preventing another one from happening. The Landsat Program, a joint venture between NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey, has recently helped emergency managers survey the damage caused by Hurricane Katrina, Mississippi River flooding, and a tornado that ripped through Springfield, Mass

Environment – Solvency

Landsats check environmental factors—key to understanding natural damage which other satellites fail to account for.
Schroeder et al 6 (Todd A., Warren B. Cohen, Conghe Song, Morton J., Canty, Zhiquiang Yang, Dept. Forest Science, UO, Forest Science Lab, Dep. Geo @ North Carolina, Systems Analysis @ Munich, http://ddr.nal.usda.gov/bitstream/10113/38625/1/IND44322324.pdf, accessed 7/5/11) CJQ

Landsat sensors record reflected and emitted energy from Earth in various wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum.  The electromagnetic spectrum includes all forms of radiated energy from tiny gamma rays and x-rays all the way to huge radio waves.  The human eye is sensitive to the visible wavelenghs of this spectrum; we can see color, or reflected light, ranging from violet to red.  Today, Landsats 5 and 7 "see" and record blue, green, and red light in the visible spectrum as well as near-infrared, mid-infrared, and thermal-infrared light that human eyes cannot perceive (although we can feel the thermal-infrared as heat).  Landsat records this information digitally and it is downlinked to ground stations, processed, and stored in a data archive. It is this digital information that makes remotely sensed data invaluable. “Observations from Landsat are now used in almost every environmental discipline,” explains John Barker, a Landsat 7 Associate Project Scientist and award-wining calibration expert. Landsat data have been used to monitor water quality, glacier recession, sea ice movement, invasive species encroachment, coral reef health, land use change, deforestation rates and population growth.  (Some fast food restaurants have even used population information to estimate community growth sufficient to warrant a new franchise.)  Landsat has also helped to assess damage from natural disasters such as fires, floods, and tsunamis, and subsequently, plan disaster relief and flood control programs.

Environmental Standards – Solvency

Landsats are key to mapping agriculture and enforcing environmental standards.
Holton 2000 (W. Conard, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1637957/pdf/envhper00304-0032-color.pdf, accessed 7/7/11) CJQ

As the agency with its eyes on the sky, NASA has long played a role in supporting U.S. agriculture. The Commercial Remote Sensing Program (CRSP), run out of Stennis Space Center, Mississippi, has the charter to take what has been a duel military/civilian technology and target its commercial uses. Nathan Sovik, manager of applications research and development at the CRSP, says that NASA can help private companies develop and prove their remote sensing technology and can develop new applications on its own. "Geological exploration and vegetation mapping have been the traditional civilian applications for remote sensing," he says. "Now we're looking to open up new areas such as high-resolution forest inventory and precision farming." Landsat satellites have been the most consistent suppliers of information to the agricultural research community, from the 1972 launch of the first one, which carried a four-band multispectral scanner, to the launch in April 1999 of Landsat 7 with an eight-band scanner. Resolution from the most recent satellite varies between approximately 15 and 60 m, depending on the spectral band. Approximately 80 more Earthobserving satellites are scheduled to be launched in the next 15 years. The IKONOS satellite, launched in September 1999 by Space Imaging of Thornton, Colorado, is authorized by the U.S. government to release images at 1-m resolution and is the first of several commercial imaging satellites scheduled to be launched. Sovik says that NASA is also contributing the latest in remote sensing capability by using the Advanced Thermal and Land Applications Sensor (ATLAS), installed on a Lear 23 jet. ATLAS can scan 15 spectral bands and is capable of 2-m resolution. It has proven its value in numerous agricultural settings, from tracking drought conditions on farms to testing for atmospheric effects of moisture and aerosols on images collected by remote sensing equipment and compared to data collected by satellites or ground-based systems. Sovik says an application being considered is the use of remote sensing to enforce environmental standards compliance by farmers. For example, he asks, "If a farm field abuts a stream and you get an algal bloom downstream, how do you know whether it is a natural occurrence or caused by the farmer's behavior? Unless you are flying over at exactly the right moment, it's very difficult to determine.