Integrated Assessment of Physical, Ecological
and Socio-economic Aspects of a Watershed System
Funding Agency: NSF (SES 0243872)
Contact: Kevin Czajkowski, 419-530-4274, kczajko@utnet.utoledo.edu

Use of Thermal Infrared Satellite Data in Climate Change Studies
Funding Agency: NASA (NAG-5-8671)
Dr. Kevin P. CzajkowskiJames Coss, Teresa Benko, Janet Struble, Jessica Rose, Stephen Mather

Land Surface Environmental Conditions from Satellite Imagery
Funding Agency: NASA (NAG-5-8052 and NAG-5-8671)
Dr. Kevin P. Czajkowski
James Coss, Teresa Benko, Janet Struble, Jyothy Nagol, Stephen Mather

GLOBE Program
Funding Agency:NSF (GEO-0222905)
Dr. Kevin Czajkowski, Dr. Alison Spongberg, Dr. Mark Templin, Janet Struble, Teresa Benko, Timothy Ault, James Coss - U of Toledo.
Jackie Kane - St. Ursula Academy, Toledo

Development and Validation of a Turbidity Product for Lake Erie:
GLERL's CoastWatch Satellite Program
Funding Agency: NOAA
Kevin Czajkowski and James Coss, University of Toledo

Army Corps of Engineers, Upper Auglaize Non-point Pollution
Funding Agency: Army Corps of Engineers
PI: Kevin P. Czajkowski, University of Toledo
Co-I: Patrick Lawrence, University of Toledo
Co-I: Carolyn Merry, Ohio State University
James Coss, Michael Palmer, Mark Fedders, University of Toledo

Considerations of a long term sediment modeling initiative by the Army Corps of Engineers/US Geological Survey/NRCS include continued building of watershed databases/monitoring of the drivers of a watershed model, expanded monitoring of sediment pollution, and determination of the fate of sediments (as well as implications for contaminant transport and ecological impact of sediments/pollutants).

Agricultural Land Use Mapping with Multi-Temporal Imagery
Funding Agency: Great Lakes Commission
Kevin Czajkowski and James Coss

The Portage and Sandusky River drainage basins do not have an accurate, comprehensive, complete and current geographic databases of land use and land cover that are needed for the watershed partnerships to effectively use in making planning decisions about their watersheds. Furthermore, both the Portage and the Sandusky watersheds have been identified as significant sources of sediment and are listed as watersheds of special significance by the Army Corps of Engineers and the Sandusky watershed is slated by the Army Corps to be modeled under the 516 program.

Integrated Assessment of Physical, Ecological
and Socio-economic Aspects of a Watershed System

Number of Students: 12
Number of Weeks of Summer Program: 10
Contact: Kevin Czajkowski, 419-530-4274, kczajko@utnet.utoledo.edu
Website: http://remotesensing.utoledo.edu/education/reu.html
Funding Agency: NSF (SES 0243872)

The University of Toledo's Lake Erie Center was awarded an NSF REU site (SES-9988038) with Dr. Kevin Czajkowski as the Principal Investigator and Dr. Alison Spongberg as Co-Investigator. Our REU project has been very successful over the last three years and we are proposing to continue the program for another three focusing on the physical, ecological, and socio-economic aspects of a watershed system. We will provide a summer research opportunity which will 1) educate students regarding the interconnected nature of hydrological processes, water quality, demographics/economics, land use practices, riparian ecosystem quality, sediment contamination, and the legal/policy implications of river ecosystem degradation, 2) mentor students in research projects focused on the Maumee River and Lake Erie health from environmental, biological, social and policy perspectives and 3) encourage students to pursue careers in science. Results from REU student research projects can be found at http://remotesensing.utoledo.edu/resch/reu/reupro2.html.
Due to the historic concern for the health of the Lake Erie watershed, the University of Toledo has been involved in and continues to develop multidisciplinary research initiatives focused on the Maumee watershed and Lake Erie. Significantly, among the Great Lakes, Lake Erie is unique in that its water quality problems are primarily related to the specific human phenomena of agricultural pollution and urbanization. We have chosen an interdisciplinary approach with emphasis on a watershed system for our contribution to the REU program because water quality issues transcend geographic setting. Nationally, government agencies, industry and the public are at odds over how to improve water quality in our nation's streams. One of the major problems facing local and regional communities is soil erosion, sediment transport and sediment deposition in the mouths of streams. In addition, contaminants such as heavy metals, pesticides and e-coli bacteria from landfills, brownfields and septic systems pose a threat to benthic communities as well as to drinking water and recreational uses.
Our funded REU site supported 10 undergraduate students each year. In addition, a NASA grant funded two students to participate in the program. Our ten-week summer program has involved the REU students in research efforts to address the environmental degradation of the Maumee watershed, the major environmental and social processes involved in defining the extent of the degradation problem and its associated remediation and the related policy/legal issues. The various projects group students with faculty and graduate students to study research projects that relate to the REU students' areas of interest. In our program, REU students gain a broad understanding of environmental issues through guest speakers from the local community who present the status of local, state and national efforts to remediate watersheds and career opportunities with their agency or in their field. In addition, the students learn techniques for collecting field observations through collecting environmental samples (soil, water, ands biological), ground truth observations for remote sensing projects or GPS coordinates for Geographic Information System (GIS) projects.
Each year the program has attracted increased positive attention from faculty members who have seen the benefits to their individual research through the REU program. Therefore, we hope to expand it to 12 REU students for each of the next three years. Faculty involvement has increased especially from the Department of Earth, Ecological and Environmental Sciences (EEES) primarily due to the addition of four new faculty members with interest in environmental research.
Students will be recruited from all over the United States with particular attention paid to students from universities of underrepresented groups in science. Through recruiting efforts, nearly 60% of the REU students for our past three summers have been women, which is significant considering the traditional male dominance of Earth Science and Geography. Our recruitment of minority students has been less successful, with only two of 32 students being minorities. However, this is comparable with the percentage of those minorities majoring in these areas in the vicinity of our program. This is an area that we will address over the next three years.

Use of Thermal Infrared Satellite Data in Climate Change Studies

PI: Dr. Kevin P. Czajkowski
James Coss, Teresa Benko, Janet Struble, Jessica Rose, Stephen Mather
Funding Agency: NASA (NAG-5-8671)

Land Surface Environmental Conditions from Satellite Imagery

Funding Agency: NASA (NAG-5-8052 and NAG-5-8671)
PI: Dr. Kevin P. Czajkowski
James Coss, Teresa Benko, Janet Struble, Jyothy Nagol, Stephen Mather

GLOBE Program

Funding Agency: NSF (GEO-0222905)
Dr. Kevin Czajkowski, Dr. Alison Spongberg, Dr. Mark Templin, Janet Struble, Teresa Benko, Timothy Ault, James Coss - University of Toledo
Jackie Kane - St. Ursula Academy, Toledo

link to SATELLITES/GLOBE page

Engaging students and teachers as scientists is a goal of GLOBE. We propose to engage GLOBE students in research projects associated with the Energy Cycle and the Earth. We will build off our team's recent experiences training teachers in summer workshops, holding GLOBE workshops and carrying-out student centered research projects. Much of our work with teachers and students focuses on local schools in Northwest Ohio and regionally to Michigan, Pennsylvania and the rest of Ohio. Under this GLOBE proposal we will extend our experience to reach students and teachers on an international level. Our focus on the energy cycle will allow us to develop student research activities that integrate the earth as a system. We plan to take responsibility for the cloud cover and type, snow, air temperature, soil temperature and soil moisture protocols and the continuous air and soil temperature protocols. We plan on creating new learning activities using the new and existing data for classroom extensions. We will look at several of these protocols to determine if they need to be modified to address teacher suggestions as well as enhance their scientific application. For example, we plan to explore probes to measure soil temperature at deeper sampling depths than currently used. We anticipate that the deeper observations will show the students a larger change in temperature. Also, under this proposal, we will develop and test a new protocol to observe surface skin temperature, i.e. the temperature of sidewalks, parking lots, leaves, grass, bare ground as determined by the electromagnetic energy they emit. This surface temperature is at the center of the energy cycle because it is influenced by incoming solar radiation as well as the properties of the surface and subsurface. The surface temperature protocol will be especially useful by inner-city schools with limited natural space. Scientifically, all of these protocols are linked through the Earth's energy cycle. We currently are conducting scientific investigations using GLOBE student data. In particular, we are validating the snow detection algorithm and cloud screening technique from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on the Terra satellite. We propose to extend this research under the GLOBE grant to include validation of surface temperature from satellite. Dr. Czajkowski has worked on surface temperature validation for six years and has published several journal articles on the topic. Finally, we will assist schools in developing research questions of their own. Specifically, students will be able to investigate the urban heat island effect and the effects of clouds, snow and soil moisture on the surfaces absorption of energy. By monitoring soil temperature with depth the transfer of heat and energy from the surface into the ground can also be investigated. The temporal data that this new area will obtain will provide valuable data for evaluating global changes in the climate and environment.

View a slide presentation on Surface Temperature Investigation of Untilled and Conservation-Tilled Farm Fields.
This presentation was prepared by Kevin Czajkowski, Tim Ault, Terri Benko, and Takelia Bragg, all of the University of Toledo.

Development and Validation of a Turbidity Product for Lake Erie:
GLERL's CoastWatch Satellite Program

Kevin Czajkowski and James Coss, University of Toledo
Funding Agency: NOAA

Rationale

Although the clarity of the Great Lakes has improved dramatically over the last 30 years, erosion, sediment (non-point source pollution) and sediment transport still remain a significant environmental problem for decision makers. For example, the Maumee River that drains the largest Lake Erie watershed and flows through the City of Toledo is a significant contributor of sediment to Lake Erie. Although the Maumee River contributes only 3% of the water that flows through Lake Erie, it contributes more than half of the suspended sediments that enter the western basin (Herdendorf and Krieger, 1989). The majority of the watershed (76%) is heavily cultivated for the production of cash crops, corn, soybeans and wheat (Baker, 1985). High sediment levels in the water deleteriously affect aquatic ecosystems, shipping, and public recreation. The Army Corps of Engineers spends millions of dollars each year dredging sediments from the western basin of Lake Erie and the Maumee River. Many of those sediments are contaminated and must be disposed of in holding areas (man-made islands) in Lake Erie.

Satellite remote sensing offers an inexpensive way to monitor the turbidity of the Great Lakes and has the potential to help decision makers address the environmental, economic and social impacts of sediment in the water.

CoastWatch

The NOAA CoastWatch Program for the Great Lakes was developed by Dr. Leshkevich of the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory (GLERL). It uses the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) to produce water temperature and visible reflectance products, RadarSat for ice detection, SeaWifs for ocean color monitoring and Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) satellite images for cloud monitoring over the Great Lakes. CoastWatch displays the images in real-time on the Internet at: http://coastwatch.glerl.noaa.gov/. The visible reflectance images from AVHRR available through CoastWatch are the first step towards a turbidity or sediment satellite product. The current reflectance product uses the visible and near-infrared wavebands of the AVHRR. Atmospheric correction of the AVHRR signal needs to be addressed before a viable sediment product can be produced. Under this GLERL proposal, we plan to improve the reflectance product to produce a readily usable sediment product to enhance decision making in the Great Lakes.

Activities Planned Under GLERL Internal Funding

With GLERL internal funding we propose to build on the work already done at the University of Toledo's Lake Erie Center and under GLERL's CoastWatch Program. The first step in the process is to acquire the AVHRR CoastWatch imagery from GLERL and read it into a remote sensing software package. In order to do this, we must uncompress the images and scale them to obtain an 8 bit reflectance product. We will use the imagerd.f fortran program or the JAVA tools developed at GLERL to read in the images.
Once the database is established, we will develop atmospheric correction techniques to enhance the CoastWatch AVHRR reflectance to a turbidity product. During the summer of 2003, we will take water samples and analyze for turbidity and total solids using the Lake Eire Center boat on Lake Erie. This part of the project will be funded by the Lake Erie Center and Dr. Czajkowski's NSF REU and NASA grants. We will then perform the following:

1. Develop and validate a turbidity product from the AVHRR reflectance product by applying various atmospheric correction techniques.
2. Process the AVHRR CoastWatch imagery to produce a turbidity product from 1990 to 2001.

There are several atmospheric correction methods that could be used for the reflectance product including using dark targets, local visibility observations or full radiative transfer models, Modtran4 or 6S. Our approach will be to start with the simplest technique, dark object subtraction, to determine how well it works and when and where it has difficulty. We will then employ more rigorous techniques if they are warranted. Finally, we will process the 512 by 512 AVHRR scenes of Lake Erie and Lake Ontario from 1990 to 2001.

Army Corps of Engineers, Upper Auglaize Non-point Pollution
University of Toledo

PI: Kevin P. Czajkowski, University of Toledo
Co-I: Patrick Lawrence, University of Toledo
Co-I: Carolyn Merry, Ohio State University
James Coss, Michael Palmer, Mark Fedders, University of Toledo
Funding Agency: Army Corps of Engineers

Agricultural Land Use Mapping with Multi-Temporal Imagery

Kevin Czajkowski and James Coss
Funding Agency: Great Lakes Commission

link to proposal

Maumee Watershed Geographic Information System (GIS) and Remote Sensing Project

Dr. Kevin Czajkowski, Dr. Patrick Lawrence, James Coss, Phil Haney, Katie Swartz, and Rumiko Hayase
Funding Agency:

Visit the website for this project...

As of October 2005, the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) has entered into a five year Memorandum of Understanding with the Geographic Information Science & Applied Geography (GISAG) Research Center of the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toledo, Ohio.

Work performed will assist NRCS in implementing the Maumee Watershed project, including sub watershed rapid resource assessments, watershed and area planning, on farm conservation planning and delivery of conservation technical assistance and conservation cost-share programs authorized by the 2002 Farm Bill that are of mutual interest to University of Toledo and NRCS.