Classroom applications of marine and environmental remote sensing data

Abstract

The US Coast Guard Academy teaches remote sensing as a capstone course to their junior and senior marine and environmental sciences majors. Students apply knowledge learned in other courses toward the interpretation and analysis of marine and environmental satellite data. The classroom portion of the course first provides an overview of the theoretical aspects of determining geophysical properties from space, and then looks at how remote sensing can be used to study specific ocean and atmospheric processes including stratospheric ozone, phytoplankton, weather, ocean circulation, El Nino, fisheries, and polar sea ice. A lab curriculum also supports the classroom portion of the course. The Remote Sensing laboratory employs data from the Coastal Zone Color Scanner (CZCS), Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR), Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS), and Special Sensor Microwave Imager (SSM/I). Future plans call for developing a more general classroom/lab curriculum which other educators can readily incorporate into their own classroom, to be placed on the World Wide Web (WWW) and eventually CD-ROM.