Finishing Downloading Hood, still working on 6s and finding the acquisition times

This week:

I was really hoping to have a MobileMe apple gallery page up of the cropped images I’ve downloaded for both Rainier and Hood for you to look through and double check before I really dive into the 6S atmosphere correcting. Unfortunately, Digital Earth was locked today and I couldn’t get into it to crop the photos via ENVI. I spent about an hour today trying to figure out how to crop the photos via photoshop just to show you what they look like but couldn’t figure it out. I know I must do it via ENVI to preserve the Geo referenced TIFF info but I was hoping to have a nice gallery of photos up for you. I guess it will have to wait until next week, besides I’m still waiting on a few images from the USGS for Mt. Hood and one last image for 2004 for Mount Rainier. The 2004 images for Mt. Rainier are a bit sketchy because there are some clouds (the other dates from June-Nov are completely covered over), as are the images for 2007 for Mt. Hood. This is why I really wanted to have them up in a gallery. I’ve sent an email to Dawn Wright asking for the code for Digital Earth so that I’ll be able to get in there in the future. Guess I’ve just been lucky up till now. I’ve also condensed just the relative images (B4, B5) for each date into a file system and once I have those initially cropped from ENVI I think the file size for this project will go down drastically and backups will be easier for me to my Time Machine Drive. I have all of the original downloaded files backed up via my Time Machine Drive so I shouldn’t lose anything.

Next week:

Hopefully, I’ll have all the images from 1997-2008 for both Rainier and Hood by next week. I’m still working on filling out the excel spreadsheet I made with all the relevant metadata for each image and will continue to work on that. Next week, if I get the images that I’ve ordered electronically from USGS GLOVIS I’ll be able to crop all of them in ENVI and put up quick galleries online for you to flip through to see all the images from 1997-2008 for both volcanoes. An example is here.

Questions:

I noticed that in an email a couple weeks back you said I’d be working on images from 1984 to present but a few times ago when we talked you had said 1997 to 2009 for each mountain. Should I also be attempting to download images from GLOVIS via Landsat 5 all the way back to 1984?

You had mentioned that in 6S for the ground reflectance parameters that I should use Non-Uniform and for the constant value of the 6S reflectance for Band 4 wavelength to .65. What is it for Band 5 and does this change between Landsat 5 and Landsat 7? Is this something I can easily look up via the Landsat website? When 6S asks for the coordinates I am simply giving the coordinates for the top of each mountain as the center. Is this ok or will it skew the atmospheric correction because both mountains are far from the “center” of the Landsat image?

PS. Finally got to read your website. Looks like Seth is in a great school there and you have settled into a great place. Too bad about the car not making it to the resort. I’m sure you’ll make it with chains next time. If you have a few moments definitely click that gallery link I put under the “next week” section. It’s a gallery of my best landscape photos over the past 10 years but if you scroll towards the end you’ll see some beautiful ones from last weekend when Emily and I went to Goat Rocks Wilderness, plus a couple of Rainier. I’ve hiked over 2,000 miles and over 250 mountains now so it says a lot when I firmly say, IT WAS THE BEST AND MOST BEAUTIFUL OUTDOOR EXPERIENCE I’VE EVER HAD, and was a great weekend just before my 30th birthday! You definitely need to check when you return. The pink mountain at sunset is the north side of Adams which was perfectly framed in the valley we sat atop of next to a glacier fed lake. 60 elk, 20 goats, 8 marmots, a bald eagle, and two pikas as well.... cheers!