Title: Image Creation for Geologic Analysis and Photo-interpretation

Biography:

Dave Koger began his remote sensing career with a company that designed analog and computer-based image analysis systems.  He developed applications and eventually moved on to do applied and basic research at the Center for Remote Sensing and Energy Research at TCU. Koger chaired a non-profit that performed cooperative, pre-competitive, applied R&D on emerging satellites and airborne scanners.  He served on program committees for international conferences on Remote Sensing for Exploration Geology and for Precision Agriculture.  He reported to NOAA about what the next generation of Landsat satellites should be, contain, and do. Koger has studied areas all over the globe and conducted a satellite photogeology study of Nebraska.  Since that work was delivered, all of the ten earthquakes that registered 3.0 and above on the Richter scale have coincided with features mapped in the work he delivered.  He has performed many projects for government agencies, including several for the DOE and CO2 sequestration.

Abstract

Satellites and aerial platforms provide the information that solve a broad range of problems.  Every weather condition, i.e. seasons, climates, sun angles, wet or dry, can be seen in the 50+ year archive. There are an unbelievable number of uses.  Exploring for oil, mineral and water involves finding geological structures and geochemical anomalies, planning seismic surveys, avoiding surface damages and documenting pre-existing conditions.  Satellites also spot methane leakage and monitor progress being made by our subcontractors anywhere on the globe. Micro-plastics suppress the ocean's surface roughness in the same way that natural—and man-made—oil slicks do, which makes them "visible" to satellites; habitat monitoring requires data that span large timeframes; fishing is better when water quality, sediment loads, and the convergence of ocean currents are known.  Satellite data are critical to predict landslides, for engineering geology projects, illegal logging, crop yield prediction, and tracking events, like the growing threat from tick migration, as no other tool can.  Archaeologists find ancient, buried structures. Expert witness cases are supported with locating wildfire ignition sites, damages to crops, livestock, outbuildings, ponds, trees, and soil loss.  This aids a robust defense or supports the wisdom of settling out of court.  Material inventories, improvements to facilities, and buried environmental damages are other cases. Remote sensing data have three attributes: spatial resolution, spectral resolution, and points in time.  They include visible light (ROYGBIV) and many wavelengths beyond human perception, e.g. infrared, thermal, and "active" sensors that include lidar and radar.  The data are measured and quantifiable.  They present an augmented—not virtual—reality.  They are not a model:  they are an array of information points, interpreted visually and, lately, with AI.  Scientific results will be even better as even cleaner and sharper data are on the horizon, including more hyperspectral sources and more frequent revisits.