Topic 2e - Looking at land

I want to talk about remote sensing of the land surface, in particular. And this presents its
own special set of challenges. And I'm sure everyone says that about their particular problem.
But the land surface makes up 30% of the global surface. But it's the part that we interact
with. It's the part that we live on. It's the part that provides our food, predominately, and our
shelter. And so we have a particular reason for wanting to understand and measure the land's
surface.

One of the key challenges is the heterogeneity. So if we look at this map, which I'll come back
to, we can just see, straight away, how heterogeneous this land's surface is. Now the parts of
the ocean and the cryosphere are heterogeneous too, but not at the same range of scales
that the land surfaces. So that's one of the key challenges that we have in trying to
understand the land surface and to monitor change over time.

There are other issues that make the remote sensing of the land surface particularly difficult
to do, in some respects. The system changes in response to climate-- in response to us, and it
changes at spatial and temporal scales ranging from millimetres and centimetres up to
kilometres and up to regional landscapes scales. It also changes in time over a huge range of
scales. And so this range of spatial and temporal scales that we have to deal with, in remote
sensing of the land's surface, is somewhat of a challenge.

The measurements we make are, by definition, remote. What that means is that we rarely get
to measure the things that we actually want to measure, directly. So this is particularly true of
the land surface. When we want to talk about forests, when we want to talk about
vegetation, when we want to talk about our impacts on the land surface, our management of
it in agriculture, and so on-- typically, the sorts of things that we want to measure are the
amounts of stuff that's there, what type of stuff it is, and how it's changing over time.

Those are measurements-- those are properties which are very far away from the sorts of
things that we can measure from satellites, where we get to sit above the atmosphere. And
we get to capture and count photons, that are typically reflected from solar radiation, that
arrive at the top of the atmosphere. And we get to record those in some sort of image data.
The challenge is turning those photon counts, at the top of the atmosphere, into something
that we can interpret.

So I've got an example of a rather direct measurement that we can use here. This is a lovely
image of forest change between 2000 and 2012, as mapped by the Landsat series of
satellites. So if we look at this in a bit more detail, here, and I'd like to zoom in here. We're
looking at the South American Amazon here. I can zoom right in.

We can see several things here that are particularly important. First of all, the colour scheme
here-- the red is change that's occurred-- forest that's been lost between 2000 and 2012. So
the red bits are bits where there used to be forest and the forest is gone. Green is where
there was forest cover, in general. And the black bits are bits where there's no forest at all. So
we're just going to ignore those for the moment.
Blue bits are bits where forest has appeared between 2000 and 2012. Now, that might sound
a bit odd. We all know that there's this forest loss going on, all over the world, particularly in
the tropics. But there is also forest being replanted, partly for agricultural reasons, but also
partly for forest restoration programmes. The pink regions we have down here are areas
where there's been both loss and gain during the period from 2000 to 2012.

So what this map illustrates is first of all, that we can see large sways of forest loss. This is
primarily due to logging, but also due to clearance for agriculture. Remote sensing of the
land's surface does this sort of thing rather well. What we can see here is we can see a broad
measure of change from one period to another period.

And this is built up from aggregate Landsat data, over the last 15 years or so, that have all
been brought together and processed into a sort of common format and then overlaid with
this kind of mapping system that we're all familiar with using. We can point and click. We can
move around. We can zoom in and out. And we can navigate our way across the globe.
However, in terms of understanding, more specifically, how vegetation is responding to
climate change, and how it's changing more subtly, we have to use more sophisticated
modelling approaches. And we have to use more indirect methods.

So if we come back to this problem of the fact that we get to make rather indirect
measurements of things that we're interested in, this is particularly true of the
biogeochemical cycles that we're interested in understanding in response to global change,
anthropogenic change, and climate change. One of the things that we can do, for example, is
we can measure radiation that's being reflected from the earth's surface in a range of
different wavelengths. So that's something that is a very common property of remote sensing.
We don't just measure at one part of the electromagnetic spectrum. We measure at multiple
parts.

So we can exploit this ability to measure reflected radiation in different parts of the
spectrum-- to measure and understand properties of vegetation on the surface. So vegetation
reflects, very strongly, in the near infrared part of the spectrum at wavelengths that are
longer than we can see with our eyes. But in the visible part of the spectrum, the bit that our
eyes are sensitive to, vegetation absorbs very strongly. We know this from our lessons at
school, where we see the vegetation uses chlorophyll to drive photosynthesis.

And so this contrast between the near infrared and red part of the spectrum is something
that's very particular to vegetation. So if we can measure this contrast and express it
somehow, then it tells us something about how much vegetation there is and how much
radiation it's absorbing for photosynthesis. So this map is a map produced from a global
synthesis of data from the NASA MODIS instrument over the last 14 years. So we're starting
off at 2001 and moving through to 2014.

And what we see here, coloured in green, is this contrast between near infrared and red
reflectance. And so through the passing of the seasons, as we go through the year, we see
the greening up of the northern hemisphere in the northern hemisphere summer. And then of
course the browning down, the senescence of the vegetation, in the autumn and winter, and
the corresponding greening in the southern hemisphere. So this concept of using this contrast
between near infrared and visible reflectance is something that tells us about roughly how
much stuff there is on the surface that has chlorophyll in it and that is photosynthesising.

So there are numerous methods that you can use, when you have remotely sensed data from
various sources, to estimate how much carbon is stored in biomass in forests. So you can use
optical data. You can use the reflectance in the near infrared which is correlated with how
much biomass is in the system. But the problem is it's just reflectance. So it's just the canopy
that you're looking at it. So there's a relationship there, but it tends to saturate or it tends to
give you an answer up until a certain level of biomass. You can also use radar, at different
wavelengths, that can penetrate the canopy and give you a scattering signal based on how
much biomass is present in the system.

The challenge with a lot of these data sets is that we don't have a very long data record for
any of them. So we're just starting to get baseline data. But if you want to look at changes
over time, we still don't necessarily have that information. For example, LiDAR is a very recent
form of satellite data collection, where we just have canopy height. So that's very useful
information. It correlates well with biomass. And there are equations that you can apply to
forest height to then derive how much biomass is in the system. However, LiDAR is, generally,
pretty spotty in terms of its coverage both spatially and temporally.

So each of these has benefits and drawbacks. The radar sensors are able to see through
clouds. So that's really important for those tropical regions where you have lots and lots of
biomass but also lots of obscuring cloud cover for most of the year. But you, basically, can
play those senses off of each other and use them together to start to get a better sense of
how much carbon is stored, how much is being emitted from land use change, and how much
is being sequestered.