Using NASA`s Airborne Topographic Mapper IV to Quantify Geomorphic Change in Arid Southwestern Stream Systems

Details Using NASA`s Airborne Topographic Mapper IV to Quantify Geomorphic Change in Arid Southwestern Stream Systems Using NASA`s Airborne Topographic Mapper IV to Quantify Geomorphic Change in Arid Southwestern Stream Systems

Dec 2005

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2005agufm.p33d..04f&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2005, abstract #P33D-04

Physics

1855 Remote Sensing (1640), 1861 Sedimentation (4863), 1895 Instruments And Techniques: Monitoring

Scientific paper

Understanding how arid stream systems respond to individual climatic events is often difficult given the dynamic and `flashy' nature of most watersheds and the unpredictable nature of individual storm events. Until recently conventional methods for quantifying change dictated the use of stream gauge measurements coupled with periodic cross-section measurements to quantify changes in large-scale channel geometry. Using this approach to quantify change across large areas often proves to be impractical and unattainable given the laborious nature of most surveying techniques including modern GPS systems. Alternately, airborne laser technologies such as NASA's Airborne Topographic Mapper (ATM) are capable of quantifying small-scale changes (~5-10cm) across large-scale terrain rapidly and accurately. The ATM was developed at the NASA-GSFC Wallops Flight Facility. Its current version, ATM-4, measures topography 5,000 times per second across a 45-degree swath below the aircraft by transmitting a 532nm (green) laser pulse and receiving the backscattered signal in a high-speed waveform digitizer. The laser range measurements are combined with aircraft location from GPS and attitude from an inertial navigation system (INS) to provide a precise XYZ coordinate for each (~1-meter diameter) laser footprint on the ground. Our work focuses on the use of airborne laser altimetry to quantify the nature of individual surfaces and the geomorphic change that occurs within small arid stream systems during significant storm events. In September of 2003 and 2005 acquisition surveys using NASA's ATM-IV were flown over Mission Creek, a small arid stream system in Southern California's Mojave Desert with a relatively long gauging history (>40yrs), allowing us to quantify the geomorphic change occurring within the channel as a result of the record storm events during the winter of 2004-2005. Preliminary results associated with our work are encouraging and lead us to believe that when compared to conventional GPS surveys that the accuracy of airborne data is well within the boundaries of data collection necessary for accurate scientific measurements.

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