EXAMPLES OF APPLICATIONS OF INTEGRATED REMOTE SENSING AND GIS TECHNOLOGIES TO WATER-RELATED PROBLEMS IN FAR WEST TEXAS

The rapid growth of information technologies has provided exciting new sources of data, interpretation tools, modeling technologies to the geosciences research and education community at all levels. A major challenge facing the scientific community in the 21st century is to incorporate remote sensing and GIS technologies as key components of decision-making, planning, and presentations to public and technical groups. This paper will present some examples of how remote sensing and other geospatial information can be integrated with GIS data to solve some real-world problems. We have developed some new image processing technologies and investigated others such as radar speckle removal, destriping, seamless image mosaiking, 3D visualization, supervised classification based on spectral angle mapper (SAM) and N-Dimensional Visualizer, and unsupervised classification based on the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). For banding removal, we derived a new method that we call combined principal components analysis that was very effective with our radar data. Data fusion based on the color transform technique was employed to integrate Landsat 7 (30 m ETM+ data fused with the accompanying 15 m panchromatic data) and TOPSAR data after speckle and banding removal. One of the main topics to be presented is how the integrated technologies have been used to classify pervious and impervious surfaces in a residential area in the City of El Paso, Texas. Impervious surfaces are indicators of intensive land use that inhibit recharge of groundwater, prevent natural processing of pollutants in soil and plants, provide a surface for accumulation of pollutants, and provide an express route for pollutants to waterways.