2-4 IAN Landsat

 Farmers. There is a  small eye in the sky looking down on you... but that’s a good thing.

 I have done a number of stories on small planes, helicopters, and drones flying over croplands in order to monitor status of crops. Data can be gathered regarding water distribution from irrigation systems, nutritional information relative to fertilizer application, weeds etc. Well now NASA is getting involved in a large way. The Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) is scheduled for launch Feb. 11, 2013 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. One of it’s primary missions is to monitor evapotranspiration.   Here is Idaho Department of Water Resources Media Information Contact: Rick Raymondi: “Landsat 8 will collect visible, infrared, and thermal data over the same area of the earth every 16 days. Landsat for mapping evapotranspiration (ET). Landsat is the only operational satellite that provides high resolution images that can be used to compute and map ET for individual agricultural fields. This Landsat-based ET data is incorporated into water budgets that support hydrologic models.”