A NASA team taught students at Bowling Green State University how to grab research photos from satellites.

The lectures and hands-on workshops were part of a recent $320,000 National Science Foundation grant Anita Simic-Milas won to support the promotion of the remote sensing field, called Integrating Spatial Literacy into Geoscience: Bridging the gap between education and workforce. It’s all part of the annual SPLITGeoscience Professional School.

“My goal today is to get the students introduced to how they can interact with satellite data, to get them inspired to use it more, to recognize what’s out there and available to tackle problems,” Brian Killough, Ph.D., NASA, said.

Remote sensing utilizes satellite and airborne data detected with cameras through the reflected and emitted radiation of physical characteristics of the Earth. Simic has pioneered the use of drones for this purpose, but she also uses Landsat satellites and large aircraft, mostly from NASA sources.

Killough’s lecture was called “The Open Data Cube Sandbox: Using Satellite data in Jupyter Notebooks.”

The data cube technique is a new method of analysis using freely available satellite information being promoted by Killough’s team at NASA. It’s commonly in use in more than 100 countries.

“This makes it easy,” Killough said.

He hoped to convert some of the more than 30 graduate and undergraduate students attending the event to his method of analyzing the terabytes of information that are daily coming from the satellites that are circling the Earth every day.

“It’s a matter of not feeling intimidated by working with it, and seeing it, and using it, and then beginning to think about what kind of problems can I use it on, or with what sort of dataset. It’s really just an introduction to satellite data. They can look from a satellite at the place where they live, see what it looks like and ask how might I use it to solve a problem,” Killough said.

More advanced uses would incorporate that data with local information, perhaps from drones.

There are three groups using the techniques in the US, but the key to the method is its flexibility. He said that in Virginia it might be used for hurricane research, in Washington for rain and for fires in California.

In the hands-on section of the class on Thursday, students looked at Grand Lake St. Marys, once the largest man-made lake in the world, and part of the Erie Canal.

“It’s a very polluted lake. It’s amazing the amount of — I said polluted — but it has a ton of algae problems,” Killough said of the toxic algae blooms, that are similar to those found in Lake Erie. “I went and looked at an algorithm, written by somebody in Europe, for water quality, and adapted it with a little script.”

The little program script he wrote then was used in some of the 19 Jupyter Notebook utility programs he gave freely to the students.

The utilities let the researchers look at water, radar, filtering of clouds and even calibrate the two Landsat satellites, when they are looking at the same spot on the same day.

In conjunction with the NSF funding for the workshop, he noted that the skills he was introducing result in quick job prospects.

“These are amazing skills that are in such high demand, we can’t even keep (the data scientists) at NASA,” Killough said. He added that many leave after just a few years, and he’s very excited for them, because they are all earning a great living.

Simic-Milas commented on how well her graduate students were assisting with the fellow workshop attendees.

“I trained them all to help everybody else. I never taught them this, but they are quick learners. Everybody is helping everybody. I think it is really nice,” Simic-Milas said.

The field of remote sensing is growing at a very fast rate, because of the rapid increase in the number of satellites that are producing data.

“The thing about the data cube is it’s just a tool to help people get better access to data. With CEOS, the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites, the goal is to promote the use of satellite data, and today that is based on availability, and in the last two years or so, it’s become available on the cloud,” Andrew Cherry, part of the NASA team, said of the increasingly easy access researchers have.

Jayla Marvin, a Central State University biology major, attended the workshop with thoughts about using remote sensing on vegetation to improve her research on bees.

“I’m working in the bee lab right now. My mentor told me it would be a good idea to come here to learn more about geoscience. I thought a robotic drone I was using could be programmed to fight disease related to colony collapse,” Marvin said.