Towards a History of NASA Applied Sciences: Making Land Surface Data Useful, 1974-2010
Abstract
To date, there is very little historical work on either the NASA Applications Program, or its successor, the NASA Applied Science program. The one relevant, fully-fledged history is of the Landsat program through 1980, which was carried out under the old, long defunct, NASA Office of Applications. Much more historical work can be done on these two programs, and this paper will make a small contribution towards a fuller history by tracing the evolution of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index and its migration from research product into a variety of different applications. Derived not from Landsat but from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer on the NOAA series of polar orbiting weather satellites, the NDVI dataset originated in ground-based research carried out during the 1970s. Once the AVHRR-derived version was validated in the mid-1980s, it immediately attracted attention from a variety of organizations interested in using it for their own purposes—famine warning and relief, locust warning, etc. It also became an important input to land surface models, which themselves evolved during this period to become the basis of still other applications. This paper will offer an historical analysis of the process by which NDVI became routinized, utilitarian, and deeply embedded in the products of other organizations.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2012
- Bibcode:
- 2012AGUFMPA51A2069C
- Keywords:
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- 1799 HISTORY OF GEOPHYSICS / General or miscellaneous;
- 6600 PUBLIC ISSUES