a paper submitted to IEEE Transactions on Geosciences and Remote Sensing

Geolocation algorithm for payload system onboard International Space Station, by Changyong Dou, Xiaodong Zhang, Hojin Kim and Huadong Guo, was submitted to IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote Sensing

Kate passed comprehensive examination

Congratulations to Kate, who passed the comprehensive examination today.

Field experiment went well

The experiment with SLS20 and OEBMS-1 went smoother than I had expected, mostly thank to the help from Xinhua, Junyu, Santosh, Ishara and Daniel. The alignment of SLS20 went very well, again better than last time when the instrument was tested. Still, an automatic alignment will be helpful. Installation of OEBMS-1 went well. There are three dangling connections from soil heat flux sensors that we did know where to connect. But it seems the system works.

We tried to power the SLS20 transmitter and receiver with one battery, but it did not work. Tried to connect two batteries in serial mode to boost the output voltage to 24 V, but it did  not solve the problem. Hope Daniel will find out the reason.

It was a sunny day and we all got Sun burn. At least it was not cold.

Congratulations on graduation of Santosh and Junyu

Santosh Rija and Junyu Yang graduated on May 14, 2011. I would like to attend their commencement ceremony, but I had to go to the field to set up the experiment. Congratulations on both of them. They started their study here in the Fall of 2008. Santosh will go to Southern Illinois University at Carbondale for Ph. D study at Department of Geography and Junyu is looking to advance his career in business administration. Wish them nothing by success.

Field experiment at North Dakota State University campus

We will set up an OEBMS-1 (Optical Energy Balance Measurement System) at the NDSU campus during the weekend of May 14 and 15. The OEBMS-a consists of The OEBMS1 consists of one SLS20 scintillometer system with tripods to measure the sensible heat flux, one pyrradiometer (0.3 – 30 μm) and one pyranometer (0.3 – 3 μm) to measure the radiation flux balance and three soil heat flux sensors. The latent heat flux is calculated as residuum of the other components. Two ventilated thermometers Pt1000 and one pressure sensor provide the auxiliary data for an automatic derivation of the turbulent heat flux from the scintillation measurements. The Signal Processing Unit interfaces with all sensors and communicates with a PC via a RS232 link. The software outputs the turbulent fluxes of sensible and latent heat, the incoming solar and net radiation and the ground.


It was raining on may 14. Will work tomorrow.