Day 5 – Leaving on a jet plane

Day five wrapped up a great week with a lecture about ground penetrating RADAR (GPR) and the scramble to finish assignments. The GPR seems like it could be a very powerful tool if used by someone who can understand and interpret its output. Some may see just wavy lines while others  can actually make sense of what is going on below the surface. I am curious to see it in action.

We were assigned our groups for our “common product” creation for week one in the Ka’a’awa Valley. I will be focusing on collecting as much information as I can (with partner in crime, Julianna) about areas of low vegetation (a.k.a. bare ground) as well as the beach, rocks and possibly coral reefs just off the coast.

I am hoping at least begin creating a geodatabase that have multiple attributes about each feature on the ground, including a geo-tagged photo URL. Some of this process remains unclear, but I know will come to fruition once we are on actually at the study site.

I am really beginning to think even deeper about my research. After a week long of learning about different remote sensors and numerous software programs, I am really hoping to draw some comparisons between them and determine accuracy differences and maybe even determine where the point of diminishing returns pertaining to accuracy lies as cost increases – mainly for supervised classification operations. eCognition really sparks my interest as well, so I am intent on using it again.

So tomorrow is the big day. Provides all runs smoothly, we will be on the ground at Honolulu International by 2 p.m. HST. I am filled with anticipation. I am excited to see if Oahu is how I remember it. I was there in ’89 or ’90.

At some point we are supposed to get a demo from people at Williams Aerospace. I am really looking forward to see what they do.

Time to get some sleep. I will kind of miss CSULB… thanks Long Beach for having us!

Is this us ?