CSU Monterey Bay team studies water from the sky
In October, CSU Monterey Bay received a $1.13 million grant from the U.S. Geological Survey to support their ongoing role in a project called OpenET. The tool uses satellites to calculate how much water is lost to the air after being applied to farmland. “There are still gaps in the information and understanding between how much water we need and how much we are actually using,” said Dr. AJ Purdy, a senior research scientist at CSUMB working on the project. “This project fills a big gap.” OpenET uses satellites from NASA, USGS, and others to measure evapotranspiration, or the amount of water that evaporates from soil combined with the water that transpires through plants — traveling from the roots and evaporating off the leaves. The satellites measure reflectance — energy from the sun that bounces off the Earth, which hits the satellites in different wavelengths that correspond to color. OpenET measures plant coverage, so it looks for green.
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