Engineering Commons^™

Developing A Methane Detector For Aerospace Applications, Michael A. Kirk

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere are raising the global temperature and causing adverse side effects. Of these greenhouse gasses, methane is one of the most impactful, second only to carbon dioxide. One of the methods for determining the concentration of methane in the atmosphere is taking images of the earth from space. The purpose of this project is to further a new imaging technology for detecting methane leaks called FINIS (Filter Incidence Narrow-band Infrared Spectrometer), thus improving our capability to detect and locate methane leaks and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. FINIS has been developed in various stages since 2018 and …

Advances In Process Understanding And Methods To Support River Temperature Modeling In Large Regulated Systems, Bryce A. Mihalevich

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

River temperatures play a key role in determining the suitability of habitat for aquatic ecosystems. While thermal regimes are influenced by many factors, flow and temperature patterns in large rivers are often shaped by water development. As such, water management associated with large reservoirs and diversions have also altered aquatic ecosystems. As climate change introduces new climate and hydrologic patterns, the decisions water managers make to address changes in runoff may further impact aquatic ecosystems. This calls for robust modeling tools that can predict river and reservoir temperature responses to water management decisions over large regions. However, highly variable topography …

Estimation Of High-Resolution Evapotranspiration In Heterogeneous Environments Using Drone-Based Remote Sensing, Ayman M. M. Nassar

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Evapotranspiration (ET) is a key element of hydrological cycle analysis, irrigation demand, and for better allocation of water resources in the ecosystem. For successful water resources management activities, precise estimate of ET is necessary. Although several attempts have been made to achieve that, variation in temporal and spatial scales constitutes a major challenge, particularly in heterogeneous canopy environments such as vineyards, orchards, and natural areas. The advent of remote sensing information from different platforms, particularly the small unmanned aerial systems (sUAS) technology with lightweight sensors allows users to capture high-resolution data faster than traditional methods, described …

Testing Methods Of Surficial Sinkhole Identification Using Remotely Sensed Data, Dane P. Brophy

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Nearly a quarter of all people rely on karst aquifers for drinking water. In the United States, the Safe Water Drinking Act requires a complete assessment of public water systems' vulnerabilities to contamination. As part of that assessment, watershed boundaries must be delineated, while recharge and supply locations identified. In the context of karst aquifers, surficial karst features, such as sinkholes, can act as a point source of direct recharge to karst aquifers and create vulnerabilities to critical drinking water sources. Historical methods of locating these features are inefficient and depend on basic field investigations, resulting in a clear need …

Algorithms For The Calibration And Correction Of Texel Images Using Inertial Measurement Updates, Trevor C. Welch

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

A 3D terrain map can be developed to survey the earth’s surface and provide scientists with a method of accurately modeling terrain. Some of the applications include agricultural surveys, disaster management, and object classification. In order to develop a 3D terrain map, a sensor must capture all of the data to create the map. This 3D mapping tool can be made by combining a sensor that take samples of points on the earth’s surface and combines that with a digital camera that takes an image and lays it across those samples of the earth.

In order to take data over …

Effects Of Short Season Irrigation On Pasture Yield And Predicting Yield With Sentinel-2 Satellite, Ihsan Bugra Bugdayci

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Deficit irrigation can reduce agriculture water use making additional water available for other uses. This study looked at multi-year impacts of deficit irrigation on pasture yield. The results show that that early irrigation provides the most benefit to cool season pastures and late season irrigation only had small impacts on yield. According to this research, irrigation water can be saved without impacting the yield importantly.

Remote sensing techniques are becoming a part of agriculture. Yield predictions are important for the farmers and others involved with agriculture. In this research, relationships between the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) calculated from remotely …

Analyzing Irrigation District Water Productivity By Benchmarking Current Operations Using Remote Sensing And Simulation Of Alternative Water Delivery Scenarios, Jonna D. Van Opstal

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The competition for fresh water is vastly increasing particularly in semi-arid areas. Agricultural irrigation areas are urged to decrease their water use, being the largest consumer of fresh water in these areas. Improvements in irrigation management aim at increasing crop production whilst maintaining or decreasing water use. The analysis of water productivity at the irrigation district scale is challenging due to spatial heterogeneity between fields and temporal variability between growing seasons.

This dissertation makes use of satellite-based remote sensing imagery and an irrigation system simulation model to determine the water management at different spatial scales from field scale to the …

Evapotranspiration Modeling And Forecasting For Efficient Management Of Irrigation Command Areas, Roula Bachour

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

It has become very crucial to manage water resources to meet the needs of the growing population. In irrigation command areas, and in order to build a better plan to manage service delivery from canals and reservoirs, it is important to build appropriate knowledge of water needs on a field basis. There is often a lag between the order and delivery of water to the field. Knowledge of the crop water requirement at the field level helps the decision maker to make the right choices leading to more efficient handling of the available water. The purpose of this study was …

Optical Sensors For Mapping Temperature And Winds In The Thermosphere From A Cubesat Platform, Stephanie Whalen Sullivan

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In the same way that mariners desire to know the weather their ships are about to encounter, satellite owners would like to know the conditions along their satellites' orbits. Accurate forecasts would allow operators to secure sensitive components prior to passing through a storm to reduce the risk of damage. Large solar arrays, which can act like sails, can be re-oriented to prevent the satellite from being moved out of its desired orbit. While terrestrial weather forecasters have thousands of sensors with continuous data streams available to generate weather models, very few sensors exist for space weather. Cost of sensing …

Procedures For Correcting Digital Camera Imagery Acquired By The Aggieair Remote Sensing Platform, Shannon R. Clemens

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Developments in sensor technologies have made consumer-grade digital cameras one of the more recent tools in remote sensing applications. Consumer-grade digital cameras have been the imaging sensor of choice by researchers due to their small size, light weight, limited power requirements, and their potential to store hundreds of images (Hardin 2011). Several studies have focused on the use of digital cameras and their efficacy in remote sensing applications. For satellite and airborne multispectral imaging systems, there is a well established radiometric processing approach. However, radiometric processing lines for digital cameras are currently being researched.

The goal of this report is …

Modeling Spatial Surface Energy Fluxes Of Agricultural And Riparian Vegetation Using Remote Sensing, Hatim M.E. Geli

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Evapotranspiration (ET) represents the amount of water consumed by vegetation through transpiration plus the direct evaporation from the soil surface. Understanding the amount of ET is important as it represents a portion of fresh water that is consumed and not available for further use. ET is used as indication of how much water needed for agricultural activities. This research is aimed towards providing improved estimates of ET.

The technological advances in remote sensing provide us with images of the Earth’s surface from space, using satellites, and sometimes with more detail from aircraft. We used these data in …

Retrieval Of Aerosol Mass Concentration From Elastic Lidar Data, Christian C. Marchant

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Agricultural aerosol sources can contribute significantly to air pollution in many regions of the country. Characterization of the aerosol emissions of agricultural operations is required to establish a scientific basis for crafting regulations concerning agricultural aerosols. A new lidar instrument for measuring aerosol emissions is described, as well as two new algorithms for converting lidar measurements into aerosol concentration data. The average daily aerosol emission rate is estimated from a dairy using lidar.

The Aglite Lidar is a portable scanning lidar for mapping the concentration of particulate matter from agricultural and other sources. The instrument is described and performance and …

Incorporating Spatial Information Into Gas Plume Detection In Hyperspectral Imagery, Cameron S. Grant

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Detection of chemical plumes in hyperspectral data is a problem having solutions that focus on spectral information. These solutions neglect the presence of the spatial information in the scene. The spatial information is exploited in this work by assignment of prior probabilities to neighborhood configurations of signal presence or absence. These probabilities are leveraged in a total probability approach to testing for signal presence in a pixel of interest. The two new algorithms developed are named spatial information detection enhancement (SIDE) and bolt-on SIDE (B-SIDE). The results are explored in comparison to the clutter matched filter (CMF), a standard spectral …

Cooperative Remote Sensing And Actuation Using Networked Unmanned Vehicles, Haiyang Chao

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This dissertation focuses on how to design and employ networked unmanned vehicles for remote sensing and distributed control purposes in the current information-rich world. The target scenarios are environmental or agricultural applications such as river/reservoir surveillance, wind profiling measurement, and monitoring/control of chemical leaks, etc. AggieAir, a small and low-cost unmanned aircraft system, is designed based on the remote sensing requirements from environmental monitoring missions. The state estimation problem and the advanced lateral flight controller design problem are further attacked focusing on the small unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) platform. Then the UAV-based remote sensing problem is focused with further flight …

Remotely Sensed Data Assimilation Technique To Develop Machine Learning Models For Use In Water Management, Bushra Zaman

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Increasing population and water conflicts are making water management one of the most important issues of the present world. It has become absolutely necessary to find ways to manage water more efficiently. Technological advancement has introduced various techniques for data acquisition and analysis, and these tools can be used to address some of the critical issues that challenge water resource management.

This research used learning machine techniques and information acquired through remote sensing, to solve problems related to soil moisture estimation and crop identification on large spatial scales. In this dissertation, solutions were proposed in three problem areas that can …

Algorithm Development Of The Aglite-Lidar Instrument, Christian Marchant

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Particulate emissions from agricultural operations are increasingly receiving attention from regulatory bodies as a potential source of air pollution. The Space Dynamics Laboratory (SDL) has developed the Aglite system, a suite of instruments including a lidar that is capable of measuring particulate emission levels from agricultural facilities. This system provides a novel method of measuring particulate mass (PM) pollution, allowing measurements to be taken of diverse types of facilities with high temporal and spatial resolution. This high resolution allows for the measurement of emission levels generated by specific activities, fostering the development and determination of best management practices.

The Aglite …