Yuba County officials attend NASA workshop

If you believe space technology is “way out there” and has no application to the problems you face as a county official, you need to meet Al Amaro and crew from Yuba County, Calif. Amaro is a county supervisor who is using space age technology to solve on-the-ground problems. Recently, Amaro attended a three-day NASA-sponsored workshop that outlined what NASA can do for local governments. Following is a report on the workshop.

Yuba County, Calif. officials, including Supervisor Al Amaro, attended a three-day Applications of Geospatial Information workshop recently to learn about what space technology can do to improve services at the state, local and tribal (SLT) levels.

They were among the more than 250 professionals from the 14 Western states invited to attend.

The workshop was one in a series sponsored by NASA Earth Science Regional Applications Initiative (RAI), whose intent is to apply earth science knowledge, data and technology from NASA-sponsored research and other sources to problems that confront state, local and tribal governments and other regional organizations.

The theme of the workshop was “From science to application . . . innovation through partnership.” It kicked off with short technical courses for the uninitiated to the seasoned professionals. The workshop continued with formal presentations from academia and the private and public sectors. Topics included implementation of remote sensing and geospatial technology, case studies of how this technology has been applied, and an overview of federal and industry programs.

Workshop organizers hoped to guide SLT representatives to sources of data, software and technical support; create a broad-based network to support SLTs in using remote sensing and geospatial information; and identify, assess and help effectively meet those needs.

After two days of sessions, participants broke into four groups to discuss urban infrastructure, planning and growth management; environmental assessment remediation and management; agricultural and forest resource management; and disaster management. Each group was to select four projects to present at the final session for NASA to consider as potential demonstration projects.

In the disaster management session Yuba County officials successfully advocated using ground-penetrating radar to identify old river beds under levees, a major cause of levee failures, as a potential demonstration project. Other projects that received favorable consideration included using NASA and private-sector technology to identify canopy coverage of agriculture areas and forests.

In the agriculture area, remote sensing using a number of space-drive technologies has been proven to improve crop yields and reduce operation costs. Remote sensing has been used effectively in forests to track ground cover changes and to make mitigation planning more effective.

Amaro said, “Such workshops are a must for county supervisors and other elected officials who are the decision-makers and those in a position to approve funding of these partnerships.” Amaro went on to say, “We would be remiss not to avail ourselves of these new technologies, which we can only afford through partnerships with agencies such as NASA.”

Participants received a compact disk resource guide that includes software, sample data sets, and a guide to useful Web sites to increase the awareness of potential applications within SLT agencies.

The disk is available for review by contacting Amaro at (530)749-7501. Those wishing to learn more about NASA and the RAI are urged to visit the Geospatial Information Conference Web site www.westgis.com.

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