Overseas Travel Report

 

Jenny Lovell and Glenn Newnham

 

·        September 13 to 18, 2004: University of British Columbia, Vancouver

·        September 19 to 24, 2004: IGARSS (Conference), Anchorage, Alaska

 

September 13 to 18, 2004:
University of British Columbia, Vancouver

 

A major objective of our trip was to continue our forest lidar work with Nicholas Coops and to draw up a framework for the final report to our major funding body, the Forest and Wood Products Research and Development Corporation (FWPRDC), to be submitted mid 2005. Nicholas has recently moved from CSIRO FFP at Clayton to Vancouver, where he has taken up a position at the University of British Columbia as a Research Chair in Remote Sensing. As you would expect, Nicholas seems to have made the transition into his new role very smoothly and is benefiting from his network of existing contacts in the US and Canada.

 

During week in Vancouver we made considerable progress on cementing a framework for the final FWPRDC report, drafting some sections and assigning responsibilities for others. This was also the first opportunity for Nicholas to see data from the new ground based ECHIDNA^TM Validation Instrument (EVI) that has been built by CAR and CFFP.

 

We were lucky that our visit also coincided with a visit to UBC by Dr. Mike Wulder from the Pacific Forestry Centre of Natural Resources Canada. Mike has been very active in the application of lidar technologies to forestry and has strong contacts with other groups working in the area such as Paul Treitz’s group at Queen’s University in Ontario. We had a number of interesting discussions about our groups work and the proposed project to conduct ECHIDNA^TM experiments in conjunction with LVIS (NASA’s airborne full waveform canopy lidar) data acquisitions in North America and possible Canadian involvement in these experiments.

 

We also had some time to contribute to work on the SpecNet project. Specifically, modelling the directional dependence of the reflectance spectra collected by the spectrometer mounted on the Tumbarumba CO₂ flux tower. This also produced some good outcomes with some BRDF inversion code being written for the data using the MODIS Ross-Li kernel.

 

September 19 to 24, 2004:
IGARSS (Conference), Anchorage, Alaska

 

Many will be familiar with the International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS) from back in 2001, when it was held in Sydney. As usual the conference was well attended, with over 1100 delegates. Only around half of these were from North America making a truly international affair. IGARSS is certainly a great networking opportunity and many of the large companies and organisations in the area use this forum to generate support for proposed satellites or other major experiments. Often from the presentation titles it is difficult to know if you will be listening to an interesting science talk or a hard sell on someone’s latest proposal. That said, if you are diligent and do some reading of the proceedings beforehand there were certainly some great presentations given in a variety of application and technological areas.

 

Jenny presented some results of the integration of EVI with airborne terrain lidar data. This has already produced promising results with foliage profiles from the two technologies showing good agreement and indicating excellent prospects for scaling up our detailed ground based plot characterisation over large areas using the airborne data. Glenn presented work on modelling the angular variation of the EVI return waveforms and showed some examples of how well the data match our current theoretical construction.

 

During the week we had interesting discussions with Olaf Neimen from the University of Victoria, Alan Strahler from Boston University and Johan E.S. Fransson, Mattias Magnusson from Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. Several presentations covered results from a number of new lidar systems (including GLAS) which were of interest for the technical issues associated with laser systems. We also fell in with the Natural Resources Canada crowd who seem to be a nice bunch but much too interested in ice and snow for our liking.

 

The next IGARSS conference will be held in Seoul in July 2005 with abstracts due in late January.