Friday, July 17, 2015

July 17: Masks and the picnic table incident

It is crazy to think that we are already a third of the way through the internship; I am kind of sad but really excited for the next four weeks!  At today's intern meeting, I presented my abstract to all of the other interns and I listened to the other abstracts.  I received some feedback which I applied to my abstract (see yesterday's post).  After the meeting, I researched a bit more about SAVI and a few other indices (EVI, SATVI, LAI, NPP, etc).  I do not know if I will need or use these indices in my project, but now I have some background on all of them to the point where I would feel comfortable applying them.  In addition, I did some brainstorming on the different factors that influence both vegetation and fire severity; I wanted to come with a few ideas of different variable combinations that I could graph that might show vegetative growth and patterns.  I also did some research about Akagera and I viewed the park both on google images and google maps in order to familiarize myself with it; it is absolutely stunning!

At noon, myself and my fellow interns grilled hot dogs and kebabs and played some strange variation of volleyball (don't ask).  Also, nearly five interns died due to a picnic table and some soda, but that's another story (and no one was actually in any physical danger.  Well, not really.....). After lunch, I started applying the NBR to two images from 2004, but there were some strange lines that distorted the image.  Dr. Vodacek explained that these lines and distortions were caused by a broken mirror in Landsat 7.  In order to fix the distortions and have the images still be useful, I have to create a mask which will, you guessed it, "mask" the distortions so that they do not alter or disrupt calculations.  I started reading a little bit about masks, but they are a bit confusing because there are so many options on how to mask certain sections.  I hope that I can figure out masks by Monday so that the distorted images can be used for my project.

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