Gallery of Hood 1984-2001

This week:

I downloaded L5 imagery for Rainier and am in the process of finishing up the downloads of L5 for Hood as well. Here is my final list of the dates that look best for Rainier. The gallery of Rainier images now have several options for each year but the dates below are the ones that look best to me. I’d love your opinion on the ones that I’ve starred.

1984 - 8/4 - This is the only image available even remotely near the right time of year.

1985 - 8/23 - Again, the only day without significant cloud cover.

1986 - 9/11

1987 - 9/30

*1988 - Either 10/2 (cloudy in parts) or 8/31 (earlier but not cloudy).

1989 - 9/19

1990 - 9/22

1991 - 10/11

*1992 - 8/26 because 9/27 looks to have snow.

1993 - 8/29 - Early but the only one that was cloud free

*1994 - 7/31 is best 9/1 is very cloudy as you can see and 10/3 had many clouds and spots in image... this is a horrible year and I’m not sure what options I have.

1995 - 9/20

1996 - 10/8

*1997 - 8/8 - the only date without significant clouds but it still has a few...

1998 - 9/28

1999 - 9/7 Landsat 7

2000 - 9/25 Landsat 7

2001 - 9/20 Landsat 5

2002 - 9/23 Landsat 5

2003 - 9/26 Landsat 5

2004 - 10/14 Landsat 5

*2005 - 8/14 Landsat 5 or 10/17 L5 (partly cloudy) or combo of L7 9/7+9/23 SLC Off

2006 - 9/2 Landsat 5

2007 - 9/21 Landsat 5

2008 - 10-25 Landsat 5

If I can use that one early date of 8/14 of L5 for 2005 I can avoid the whole SLC off striping issue for Rainier. What do you think. The worst year by far is 1994. I’ve posted the best images in the gallery for that year... and they look bad, except for 7/31 which is really early... HERE is a quick link again to the Rainier Gallery.

To the right is the gallery for Mt. Hood that I’ve started as well. Once I have received the L5 images for 2001 onward I’ll post the best ones like I’ve done for Rainier and ask for your input on those as well.

Next week:

Next week I hope to have the Hood images narrowed down.

Questions:

1. • Please take a look at the dates that I’ve starred above to see which image you think is best for me to use for those years from the gallery I’ve posted.
   

2. • What is the best data that I should download from the snowtel sites? I assume SWE is probably the most important. Is there any other specific data I should be looking for?
   

3. • If I can avoid the SLC issue by using L5 imagery from 2003 onward instead of L7 could I do that? It would avoid the issue of trying to combine months to fill in the stripes of no data for each year.
   

Hope all is well. Emily started a new job this past week and her parents have been here visiting so we’ve been pretty busy showing them around the state. They leave this Friday. Hope the skiing is well there. If I can find a glacier to ski with good snow in September I will have managed to get runs in every month of this year - a first for me. :)

Ellie Visiting

I got to spend the entire day with my beautiful daughter. Ellie and Nicolette showed up late

in the morning and we got to spend the entire day together. I was staying in my sleeping bag on the floor of the living room which Ellie quickly found and wanted to explore. She was so cute climbing into the bag with me and making me drag her around the house while she sat on it. :) Amy, Kirby and Starr all loved her and she was very generous with her hugs for them. We played all afternoon, except for an hour or so of nap time in which I saved food from my mother’s broken freezer downstairs. When they came back up we played a bit more and put puzzles together with each other. She is so adorable and I love her smile! She also loves to dance and show us her “googly” eyes. She really brightens up any room and after burying my father’s ashes the day before she really brightened up my brief weekend home. I really hope that in a year or two her and her mom will come visit me out in Oregon. Check out the video of her crawling into the sleeping bag and getting scared.. so cute! You can hear her softly say... “oh no” at the end of it... hehe.

My Father's Memorial Service

This weekend I flew home for my father’s Memorial Service at the Saratoga National Cemetery in Schuylerville, NY. It was a wonderful ceremony and it was very nice to see Family that I haven’t ever met such as Greg, Paris, Mikala, and Holden Leibenguth. When I was home in July my mom and I had gotten a hold of the cemetery because we heard that they provide a military ceremony for veterans free of charge including a proper military burial. Paul, the man in charge at the cemetery, was very kind to my mother and I and spent a lot of time making sure that everything went well for us and that everything was taken care of for my father. Pastor Deane Perkins from my mother’s UU church presided over the service and his words were very kind despite barely knowing my father. I was surprised to see that the servicemen at the service were clearly WWII veterans like my father. They acted very professional throughout the whole service standing at attention the whole time. During the ceremony the pastor asked if anyone would like to say any words. No one else wanted to so I stood up and told a couple stories about my fathers life that I found to be special. I told them about how he crashed several planes and lived, and the story about him floating down the river half dead after crashing into a mountainside. I then told them about how he seemed to measure everything in “elephant units” when I was a kid. My tree fort could hold an elephant or the rope behind my snowmobile could tow an elephant.... Even my mom hadn’t heard that about him before. I sat throughout the service with my mom on my right and Star on my left. Near the end of the service there was a gun salute x3 and two of the service men took out my father’s flag and folded it tightly up into a triangle for me. The care in which they folded the flag was amazing. Then, to my surprise one of the men knelt down with the flag and presented it to me along with three shell casings. I was so caught up in the moment and with emotion that I don’t clearly recall exactly what was said to me but I’ll always remember the sincerity of the man’s eyes as he spoke the words to me on bended knee. It was one of those moments in life that I’ll always remember. Then Paul knelt down in front of my mom and told her what the arrangements would be for my father and where he would be buried. We all walked over to the burial plot and by the time we had arrived my father’s ashes had already been placed in the ground. Sean and Fran who had driven over 5 hours to attend the hour long ceremony had to return on the long drive to attend parties they had planned. The two of them showing up was one of the nicest gestures I’d ever seen in my life and was a testament to the priority of family in the Wilcox side of my family. My father’s plot was small but very nice and I know that his spirit will enjoy the setting of the cemetery with wild foxes and deer roaming the grounds and fields surrounding it.

After the service we all went to Sonny’s for some dinner. I brought my laptop and a slideshow of photos from my father’s life for everyone to look at. Greg and Paris were really impressed by all the old photos I had along with Barb and Norb. I was very happy that Bob Jones was able to make it to the service. I picked him up beforehand at his house on the lake and he was very pleased to be out with us. Bob was one of my father’s closest friends along with Ron Roemer who couldn’t make it because he was taking care of his wife. After dinner Kirby and Amy rode with me to drop off Bob at his house on the lake and snapped some pictures of us on the dock at sunset after Bob showed us all his carving studio and art (which my father taught him a great deal about). I wish that more of my father’s side of the family could have made it but I also remind myself of how hard some of their lives are and the financial burden of making the costly, long trip. I miss my father a lot. I regret that I didn’t spend more time with him in his final years but I know in my heart that he was proud of me. I am proud to be his son and I’ll always respect the memory of my father. He lived through the first cars, putting men on the moon and to an age where people find their way around town using satellites connected to their mobile phones. He saw so much in his life. I love you dad.

Update 9/29/09: Emily came home today with a glass triangular case for my father’s flag, his military stripes and the shells that were given to me at the memorial service. His flag now hangs in our apartment and will hang in our future home as well. I just need to get his dog tags next time I am home.

This I recorded when I was in my younger teens on a mini cassette tape.

This I recorded when I came home for a visit from College.

Home for New Years and recorded this.

Gallery of Rainier

This week:

Sorry it took me two weeks to post but I wanted to have a gallery to show you and now I do! :) I spent some time at the end of last week and on Monday this week trying to convert data for Sky and Stephen. I am pretty familiar with Arc formats and other proprietary formats we use at Watershed but I wasn’t too sure how to convert the data. Eventually with the help of Colin and Mischa I figured it out and I also brought over the Watershed Rainier Deliverables and gave them to Stephen who copied them and will ship them to Sky. Hopefully he will be able to read the .las files as well. I’m not sure if you kept up on the 15+ emails of late last week but I converted the DEM of the entire project to a ~5gb file that Sky said he can read based off the 100mb test file I sent him.

It has taken me several weeks to finally get all the images for both Rainier and Hood from the GLOVIS interactive map software from 1984-2008. I had some hiccups and a couple images could not be processed according to the USGS, thus forcing me to go back and look for others and re-order. Thus, it took some time. I have all the dates backed up to my large 2Tb drive and have a Western Digital Passport of all the years with just the metadata and Bands 4 & 5. That takes up only 8gb for all the images which is good. Last week it took me quite some time to get ENVI up and running on my laptop but now I do. I spent a good deal of time running through all the images I have for Rainier and cropping them according to the same size I used in my class presentations. I didn’t use the same coordinates that you gave us in the lab because it looked uneven and I don’t think it centered the mountain very well in the image. After I cropped all the Rainier images into .HDR files I re-opened them and saved them as JPEG’s so you could check them out giving each the naming convention Year_Month_day_Band. It took me a while to get through all of them but I made a gallery of them on this site which you can reach by clicking HERE or by clicking the lower right gallery image (run your mouse over it to change images).

I mentioned to you in an email a week ago that based on the trajectory of the Landsat Satellites I had more options for images and dates for Mt. Hood. Thus, I downloaded several dates and after running through and cropping them all I’m going to narrow it down to the ones that have the least cloud interference. I am going to look closely over the Rainier images as well to make sure there are no clouds over the mountain (I think in one year there is so I may have to change that date.

Next week:

Next week I plan to do the same as I have done here but for the Mt. Hood images.

After cropping down the large images to the Rainier subset for each band over all the years of Rainier I have a folder of files that is under 100mb. Once I have the Hood images cropped and turned into JPEG’s I’m going to post another gallery of the Hood images here online. I’m going to do a thorough inspect of each year for both peaks to make sure I have the best images picked out. I would like to download the Snowtel data from Paradise for all years and see how it corresponds to the images I have picked out. If for some reason the snowtel says that it has snowed significantly on the peak before the date of the image I’m going to make note of this and possibly decide on another image. I’ll keep you posted on this. Once these steps are done I’m going to keep working on finding the precise acquisition times for each image set to continue with finding the 6s atmospheric correction figures. This will take some time for sure.

Questions:

1. • What snowtel site should I use for Mt. Hood?
   

2. • If you have time please look through the gallery of images I have for Mt. Rainier and let me know if you see any that I shouldn’t use. I figure that since you have had more years looking at this imagery so maybe you can tell something I can’t.
   

3. • If you have time would you please leave a comment on this entry so I can make sure that they work.
   

I’ll be back in the office Monday afternoon next week to start cropping the Hood imagery into subsets. I’ll post the Hood gallery next week. :) Hope everything is well on the other side (and bottom half) of the world!

Catching Waves

This weekend Emily and I played it pretty low-key. No grand adventure far away. On Saturday Em and I drove over to Home Depot and she picked out some paint and a hand power sander for the job. As she went to work sanding away at her clothes dresser I went for a pretty intense mountain bike ride up through MacDunn and back down Dimple Hill via Horse Trail. I left at 3:15 and was hoping to get back by 5 so I could get ready for my closing shift at Ruby’s. I made it back by 4:55 exhausted and had just enough time to buzz my hair, take a quick shower and get to work. Unfortunately the restaurant was dead and I ended up detailing the bar all night only to make about $30 for the evening. After I got home I went over to Nikki, Courtney’s and Brittany’s for a few drinks with the Ruby’s crew which was fun.

On Sunday Em and I got up around 10am, woke Kevin up and we all went over to Hartz’s place after picking up surf boards and suits at Holm’s place. We then headed to the coast for a day of surfing at Agate Beach off of Newport, OR. We rented Emily a wetsuit at a local board shop called “Aussie’s just down the road from Agate.

The first time we went out for a while Em and I got pretty battered by the waves. The waves weren’t that big so it was a good day for us to learn. Em and I are just starting to get the feel for how to read the waves so we can paddle back out and catch new ones. Both of us were able to stand up on the foamy breakers after the wave had broke and wasn’t as high. After about an hour of getting tossed around Em and I climbed back onto the beach to let the pros (Hartz and Kevin) catch some great waves further out. I drank a whole gatorade, ate some chips and then headed out for another session with Emily as Kevin and Hartz were finally headed onto the beach. I don’t know how they had the strength to stay out so long! During this second session I felt much more comfortable and was able to paddle out to the bigger waves on several attempts, although I got thoroughly trashed by them. But.... I think I finally caught my official first wave. I paddled hard down the face of it and just as I was hoping to one knee on the board about to stand up I started to hear it crash behind me as I stood. I asked Hartz if that was “catching a wave” and he said yes! So.. I apparently caught my first legitimate wave!

After returning Emily’s wetsuit to the shop we all headed to the Rogue Brewery for some tasters and great food. It was clear that we were all pretty beat from surfing and it was a tiring ride home to Corvallis for me. Emily and I always enjoy being at the ocean. Perhaps next summer we may invest in some wetsuits ourselves and a couple boards to really give the sport a go.

Engagement Party for Kevin & Alexa

A few weeks ago our housemates Kevin and Alexa announced they were

engaged! Kevin proposed to her on top of Mary’s peak in a beautiful sunset after they got dinner. Emily and I were excited to know we were the first to know after Alexa’s parents. Thus, Saturday night a party was thrown at our place with a Miami/beach theme. Alexa cooked up some Puerto Rican / Cuban food and a slip n’ slide was purchased for the event. On the drive back from Middle Sister I didn’t even know for sure that a party was going to happen but when I got a broken message from Emily over

Aaron’s phone I stepped on the gas to get home as fast as possible.

I got home at 8pm to a whole group of people who had just finished with the

slip n’ slide and were eating some of the food Alexa cooked. Kevin and Alexa’s friends Blake and his wife Rebecca were there along with Kevin’s college friend Matt and his sister Catie. Colin and Amanda were there along with Mischa, Miwa, Cassie & Garrett, next door Kelly, and of course party maniac Danielle who quickly demanded a game of flip cup be started after everyone had eaten. I hung out and got some food and our stereo set up for louder music for everyone before I headed in to take a shower. I was sun-burned and very tired having only gotten about 9 hours of sleep over the past 48 but I felt much better once I got cleaned up.

Kevin and Alexa had bought all the fixings for me to make Mojito’s for everyone so I set to work on that task pouring 4/5 of the handle into bowl and hand mashing the mint with sugar and fresh cut limes. I poured a few cups for everyone and it was a hit! Rebecca even said it was the best mojito she’d ever had... I attribute it all to the amount of sugar I put in! Alexa swore all night that I hadn’t put in any rum in the mojito’s.. which got funny when she started slurring her words saying it. I called Hartz and he came over to hang out with all of us as well.

After several games of flip cup the punishment for losing became a run through

the slip n’ slide. Our side of the table lost and out of no where Colin came running by us in his dressy Miami outfit and went flying into the slip n’ slide he had turned on... so all

of us had to follow. Thankfully it was a warm night! After several more rounds Kevin had run off to Freddy’s and came back with a ton of energy drinks we started to use in our cups in place of beer. This livened us up for another couple hours of flip cup! By the end of the night everyone was trashed and Aaron had face planted out of the hammock! He ended up sleeping on our couch. It was a great party and congratulations to Kevin and Alexa!