Fieldwork Photos

Digging the hole for the anemometers:

Hudson Starts the Digging

Moses Helps With Digging

Digging Continues

March Overview

Mar 9 Anemometer readings for 2-22 to 3-8                     

Mar 25 First set of GPS readings from the field                               

Mar 28-30 Acquisition of TM and ALOS scenes

ASTER Digital Elevation Data: March

The area to be reached by irrigation water source (boreholes, rivers, wells) can be modeled through viewshed analyses. The process takes into consideration an “observer point” (location of water source) and “observer height” the estimated elevation from the surface the water can be lifted using a pump (treadle, wind powered, solar powered, etc.).  A viewshed analysis requires an elevation raster data set to determine which areas can be “seen” from the observer point. ASTER 30 m pixel resolution data was acquired from the NASA WIST data portal for the study region.

 The images above show a preliminary modeling of areas within and near Mzukuzuku that would be irrigable (in green) from perennial streams with a lift height of 5 m (left) and 7 m (right).

Imagery Acquisition: March

Advance Land Observation Satellite (ALOS) imagery was purchased from East View Cartographic in late March. The data bands include spectral RGB and a NIR band, all with a spatial resolution (10 m). The date of collection was during the wet season (January 9) in 2009. The imagery will be used to update acquired shapefiles, for vegetation analysis and to create new layers of the point, line and polygon locations.

This data is added to the IKONOS imagery purchased in December. The 50 square km area of high resolution (4m RGB, NIR, 1 m Panchromatic) IKONOS imagery was purchased to test its utility versus price for producing data layers to be used in the GIS.

 

Two Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) images (RGB, NIR, all 30 m) were acquired from the NASA WIST data portal. The images, one from the wet season and one from the dry season of 2010 represent a snapshot of coverage in the region of pre- and post- harvest land use. The larger spatial resolution data, as compared with the ALOS data, will be used for vegetation analysis and not useful for identifying smaller features.

 (Images: True color composites of the IKONOS, ALOS and TM images (1:10,000) at 4, 10 and 30 m spatial resolutions respectively.)