The Department of Geology and Planetary
Science (G&PS) at the University of Pittsburgh has developed
expertise in the areas of Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
and remote sensing. These research tools are used extensively
in diverse fields such as geology, environmental hazard mitigation,
archaeology, city and regional planning, national defense, economic
market evaluation, and resource exploration. G&PS faculty
offer several courses in GIS and remote sensing, presenting a
thorough theoretical background and extensive hands-on experience
with state-of-the-art software and techniques. These courses
are the only venue within the University in which this level of
instruction is available, and they have been geared to an interdisciplinary
student constituency. The department has assembled an impressive
array of hardware and software, creating a facility and a capability
which is unique within the University. G&PS faculty and students
are actively involved in research utilizing these tools. This
new focus builds on long-established expertise and national recognition
in the field of Planetary Science.
Description of Laboratory Equipment
and Data Library
Our department presently has research
remote sensing and GIS resources, including a 10 SPARC ULTRA 10 workstations,
Dual processor SPARC Server,
15 Dell and Gateway workstations and other hardware.
Together these workstations have about 775 gigabytes of disk space.
Software running on these workstations include ArcGIS 8.3 with all
optional modules, Arc/Info workstation 8.3,
Arc/View 3.3, and Earth Resource Mapper 6.5, ERDAS Imagine 8.6, IDL ENVI 3.6 and
a variety of NASA image processing tools. ArcGIS,
Arc/Info, ERMapper, IDL-ENVI, and Imagine are the leading
commercial packages for GIS and remote sensing applications.
Backup devices include a CDROM/CDRW burner, 8 mm Exobyte
tape drive, large format magneto-optical disk drive (2.4 Gigabytes per disk).
HP DesignJet 2500CP large format fully networked color printer.
The IVIS laboratory of Dr. Michael
Ramsey can accurately measure spectral reflectances over a range of
wavelengths of importance to remote sensing. This lab is described at
http://ivis.eps.pitt.edu.
The Planetary Surfaces Laboratory
in the department has UV, visible and IR spectrometers and a goniometric
photopolarimeter to characterize the spectral reflectances of
analog planetary surface materials. Through cooperation with
the University's Materials Science and Engineering Department
students have access to scanning and transmission electron microscopes.
Our department has an ever-expanding
data library, currently more than 199 gigabyes in size, which
includes NASA planetary images, all National Earthquake Center
(NEC) earthquake location and parameter data, digital topographic
data for the entire world surface and oceans (including higher
resolution data sets for North America, the United States and
Australia), and a variety of earth remote sensing data, such as
LANDSAT, SPOT, side looking airborne radar (SLAR), and synthetic
aperture radar (SAR) data from selected regions (Table 1). The
rate at which our library is growing is astounding. For example,
during a single day recently we received digital satellite images
from a major oil company of 154,000 square kilometers of the northeastern
USSR and 2.4 gigabytes of SLAR data of western North America.
We anticipate archiving data from the planned Galileo observations
of the Jupiter system, Mars Global Surveyor Project and from future
planetary exploration. The imminent change in status of EOSAT-
copyrighted LANDSAT Thematic Mapper (TM) data for non- profit
educational research groups will also allow us to further expand
our data library.
Faculty Expertise
Bruce Hapke
is internationally known for his work in reflectance spectroscopy
and the characterization of planetary surfaces by remote sensing.
He is responsible for teaching undergraduate planetary science
courses. He has recently published a book, "Theory of Reflectance
and Emittance Spectroscopy" (1993, Cambridge University Press),
and is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union. He is the
recipient of several NASA grants to develop models of the interaction
of electromagnetic radiation with planetary surfaces and to apply
these models to spacecraft observations. He and his students
have completed projects using Voyager images of the Jovian satellites
and Mariner 10 images of Mercury and Venus. He also has developed
a Planetary Surfaces Laboratory to study and model optical properties
of materials. Instruments in this laboratory allow undergraduate
students to measure the spectral bidirectional reflectance distribution
functions of known and unknown materials as part of laboratory
exercises. These data can be saved and added to an existing digital
library.
Michael Ramsey
is Director of the IVIS Laboratory at the
Department of Geology and Planetary Science at the
University of Pittsburgh. He has extensive training and experience in
physical volcanology and natural hazard mitigation using
remote sensing, GPS & infrared spectroscopy. His active research emphasis
also includes Mars surface processes, eolian systems, and urban analysis. Presently
Dr. Ramsey has active funding from NASA and the National Science Foundation. In
addition to these research activities he is presently
the co-director of both the Undergraduate Certificate and Professional Masters in
Geographical Information Systems and Remote Sensing.
Check his webpage.
William Harbert
has extensive computer skills acquired while completing a Ph.D.
in geophysics at Stanford University and an NRC research associateship
at the United States Geologic Survey, and is responsible for teaching
the undergraduate Planet Earth and the New Geosciences survey
course, GIS courses, geophysics courses and the computer laboratories
for the undergraduate remote sensing course. He has been chair
of the University Faculty Senate Computer Usage Committee for
the last three years, and a member of the Executive Committee
on Academic Computing (ECAC) and the Information Technologies
Steering Committee (ITSC). He is coauthor of "Planet Earth
and the New Geosciences" the accompanying instructional textbook
to the WQED television series. This text is in its fourth edition and includes
two CDROMs. He has successfully completed advanced training
courses in ArcGIS, Arc/Info, AML programming within ArcGIS Arc/Info, ArcScan,
ArcStorm, TIN, GRID, NETWORK, and remote sensing using ERDAS Imagine and Virtual GIS.
Check his webpage.
K/12 Educators CLICK-HERE! Pittsburgh region satellite images and software about the earth sciences!
Please contact the Department of Geology and Planetary Science for
in-school presentations, additional images, educational material,
or laboratory tours.
EARTH-The Movie. Caution 64 Mbyte AVI virtual fly-through of
Planet Earth.
University of Pittsburgh main campus!
