One of the objectives of this course is to familiarize you with geospatial tools that help us document the impacts of global change- as we see it on our landscape. By viewing the Earth from space, we use remote sensors to capture data about the changing world, and we can then use scientific visualization tools to examine the data and build our understanding of the changes in the world we live in. Here we focus on the physical science of the electromagnetic spectrum (EMS). You'll have an opportunity to explore a tutorial on the EMS. There is far more information on the NASA EMS website than you will need for the next two weeks of activities, but be sure you understand the fundamentals (Intro to the EMS) and be sure to click on the "From Energy to Image" on the side bar.
Once you review the physics, we need to think about how the EMS can be sensed and stored in a digital form and used to analyze Earth data. The important thing to remember is that digital data is stored as strings of numbers. Despite the fact that these resources are from NASA, the math this week is not "rocket science" (I guess that is almost a joke- NASA-rockets????). The math applications are included not as challenging problems to expand your mathematical capabilities, but as simple demonstrations that explain on a technical level what we are doing when we take remotely sensed data and turn it into an image. Even if you are math phobic I hope you'll spend some quality time with these questions!
