By Kyle Turner After a tense battle with downtown NYC traffic and couple of flight delays, the East Coast crew (consisting of Joaquim Goes, Helga Gomes, and Jinghui Wu from Columbia University, Charles Kovach from NOAA STAR, and myself from the Tzortziou Bio-Optics Lab) safely crossed the Atlantic Ocean and the Equator and arrived in Cape Town, South Africa for the BioSCape field campaign. BioSCape is an international collaboration between NASA and other U.S. and South African organizations to study the rich biodiversity and ecology of the Greater Cape Floristic Region (GCFR), across terrestrial and aquatic domains. Our group is one of the few aquatic-focused science teams on the project, with the goal of mapping phytoplankton functional types (PI: Wu) and carbon fluxes (PI: Tzortziou) from air- and space-based optical remote sensing. Our study has three sampling areas: St. Helena Bay, Walker Bay, and Algoa Bay, which we will be visiting over the next few weeks in conjunction with targeted overflights of NASA aircraft equipped with two state-of-the-art hyperspectral spectrometers, AVIRIS-NG and PRISM.... We will be collecting an array of discrete and continuous flow through data, including in-water and above-water radiometry, absorption, scattering, fluorescence, phytoplankton imaging, pigment analysis, and dissolved organic carbon concentrations, which will enable us to develop new and improved algorithms for airborne and satellite imagery of GCFR coastal waters.
A bit of a delay in the shipment of instruments and planned aircraft operations has allowed us some time to admire the spectacular natural beauty of the Cape Town area. We took a cable car to the top of the Table Mountain (3,558 above sea-level), which is home to a dazzling variety of endemic flora and fauna, including many species of fynbos and a small mammal called a rock hyrax (locally referred to by its Afrikaans name "dassie"), which is most closely related to the elephant! The panoramic, bird's-eye view was the perfect kick-off to our work here, with awe and appreciation of the unique life and landscape that has evolved and persisted over millions of years. We hope to be in the water collecting data real soon. More updates to come!
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