Dr. Ramsey's Work Featured Online!

Michael Ramsey, assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh and director of the Image Visualization and Infrared Spectroscopy (IVIS) Laboratory, is concerned that the same scenic terrain that attracts homeowners is also prone to brush fires and flooding. "People often forget about the constant fire danger in desert areas until it actually happens. The Rio fire in July, 1995, which burned more than 22.4 square miles (58 square kilometers), was close to a large housing development. Fire danger suddenly became a very big deal," said Ramsey. In recent years, severe drought has escalated the fire danger in the southwest ...

Ramsey uses data collected by the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) instrument on NASA's Terra satellite. Using ASTER imagery, he looks for fire scars, which he defines as "large tracts of land with highly burned vegetation or no vegetation cover at all."