During the Fall 2017 term of the NASA DEVELOP National Program, participants used geospatial technologies to investigate and analyze drought, forest cover, water resources, agriculture, ecosystem health, and disasters across the world. Each project that a DEVELOP team completes is conducted in partnership with agencies or organizations local to the study area to ensure that the project outcomes or observations will have an impact. Fundamental to the analysis and geospatial component of each of these projects is NASA Earth science remote sensing data. Many of these projects use data distributed by NASA's Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center (LP DAAC) and collected by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument onboard NASA’s Terra and Aqua platforms, the Terra Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER), and derived data from NASA’s Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM).
All the projects conducted in the Fall Term, as well as in past terms, can be found in the DEVELOP archive.
Featured Project: Temperature Trends in the Northeastern U.S.
One of the projects, “Developing Annual, Seasonal, and Monthly Temperature Indices over the Northeast United States to Represent Recent Temperature Trends using NASA and NOAA Datasets,” used NASA Earth observation data to study temperature trends throughout the Northeastern United States. According to data from NASA Goddard's Global Surface Temperature Analysis (GISTEMP) and NOAA nClimGrid, each year, for the past forty years, has been ranked in the top ten warmest years on record. While these years have been the warmest on record, some of them were still cooler in temperature than the years that surround them. For example, on average the year 2012 was colder than 2010 or 2013 but was still ranked in the top ten warmest years on record.
