EPA/MoDNR Pilot Project -
Characterizing Environmental
Contamination Through Airborne
Hyperspectral Imaging
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Following the accidental or deliberate release of hazardous materials or the dispersion of hazardous materials through a natural or man-made disaster, it is critical to locate, characterize and identify the contamination as quickly as possible. Many substances have a unique spectral signature that can be used for identification. Hyperspectral imagery (HSI) sensors have been used for a variety of environmental applications. Missouri, other states, and federal agencies will soon have access to airborne HSI through the Civil Air Patrol's (CAP) Airborne Real-Time Cueing Hyperspectral Enhanced Reconnaissance (ARCHER) program. Headquarters CAP National Technology Center is in the process of deploying 16 ARCHER configured aircraft, that will be stationed in CAP regions for Homeland Security, disaster relief, search and rescue, and other “to be defined” missions. Missouri Department of Natural Resources, the department, with a grant from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), is pursuing a Pilot Project to evaluate environmental applications of ARCHER to the department's missions of Environmental Emergency Response (EER), characterizing contamination over wide areas, and assessing other impacts to the environment. This site provides information on the pilot project in three areas, Site Development, HSI Collection and Project Results. The Project time frame is Oct. 1, 2004 - Sept. 30, 2005. The EPA Pilot Project notification and overview can be obtained below.
EPA Pilot Project Notification PDF
1. Site Development:
Site Development Workshop - April 7, 2005
On April 7, 2005, the department held a Site Development Workshop at the Truman Building, Jefferson City, for federal and state agencies to exchange information on requirements and potential applications of HSI with ARCHER's project personnel. The workshop included a briefing on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) Airborne Spectral Photometric Environmental Collection Technology (ASPECT) system. ASPECT is a hyperspectral Infrared imaging system that characterizes airborne contaminant plumes.
The Workshop began with a description of remote sensing and HSI by Dr. Clayton Blodgett, Univ. Missouri Columbia, the Pilot Project's HSI analytical lead. Col Drew Alexa, HQ CAP, Director Advanced Technology Group, followed with an overview of the ARCHER HSI system, its designed missions and the results of operational testing. Six department Project Managers (PM) then presented overviews of their contaminated sites and information requirements, with discussions on potential applications of HSI and ARCHER to their requirements following each presentation. Lt Col (Dr.) John Kershenstein, CAP/Chief Scientist Naval Research Laboratory, ARCHER design group, joined the site discussions via conference phone. The exchange of information about site contamination, potential HSI analytical applications and ARCHER capabilities was informative. It provided the PMs and Pilot Project team with an appreciation for ARCHER's capabilities, and a better understanding of potential applications and opportunities for expanding ARCHER's support to states and federal agencies.
ARCHER appears to have an immediate application to several EER and solid waste management area search requirements, and a potential to support several on-going state and federal environmental studies. The sensor collects in the visible and near-Infrared (IR) spectrum, and will have limits on applications that require mid- and long-wave IR data. An example may be identifying illegal discharge points or seeps in waterways, and locating tire dumps based on reflected heat from the tires. The Project can now focus on applications that are within ARCHER's capabilities.
An ASPECT briefing followed the ARCHER discussions, presented by Tim Curry, EPA Region 7. ASPECT is an operational asset for EPA's Emergency Response team, as well as state and federal emergency responders. Its multi-spectral sensor has 16 IR detectors, and identifies airborne contaminants by their IR signature. ASPECT was used to define underground hot areas in a landfill fire in southwest Missouri, and has limited applications to ground and water analytical requirements.
The remainder of the Workshop was open to discussions of site conditions and HSI applications by attendees. Jim Felkerson, U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), described an Oak Decline study in southwest Missouri, which HSI could potentially support.
All Workshop Briefings and the Workshop Report are available online.
Note: Below are large PDF files that may not display in a browser. It is recommended that the briefs be downloaded. Download by right clicking on the image and select "Save target as" or "Save link as," etc.
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Submitting a Site for the Pilot Project
Anyone can submit a site(s) with contamination or other environmental conditions for consideration. The sites must be in or near Missouri. All sites will be added to the database and plotted. Coverage will depend on optimizing collection and flight planning. Analysis of the imagery is limited by funding. If a site is selected for analysis, the site contact or project manager will be invited to participate in the analysis at the University of Missouri, Columbia. Site information should include
- Contact information and phone or e-mail
- Agency and office
- Site name
- Latitude (Decimal degrees, if possible, or available information)
- Longitude (Negative decimal degrees, if possible, or available information)
- Known Contaminants or environmental conditions (indicate if ground truth (sample data) is available)
- Suspected Contaminants or environmental conditions (identify suspected contaminants)
- Description of the site and contaminated area (diagram or aerial photo of the site)
- HSI Objective. What information would you like the Project to provide about the contamination or condition.
2. HSI Collection
The critical event for the Project was collecting the HSI. CAP completed ARCHER test and evaluation in spring 2005, and took delivery of the first operational aircraft that summer. Because of the impending end of the Pilot Project in September and the need for post-collection time to complete the analysis, CAP was asked to conduct an ARCHER mission in August. An operational aircraft and crew were not available. However, Col. Alexa, CAP ARCHER Project Officer, and Mr. Pete Kalisky, CAP Headquarters National Operations Center (NOC) brought together a crew that had participated in testing and the ARCHER prototype aircraft, and deployed to Jefferson City, August 7 through 9. The Missouri Army National Guard (MoNG) provided a training room in their hanger at the Jefferson City airport for CAP, University of Missouri Columbia (UMC) and department personnel to plan and execute two days of collection missions. The ARCHER aircraft was housed in the Missouri Office of Administration (OA) hanger.
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| ARCHER Ground Staton in MoNG Training Area | UMC IMAGINE Hyperspectral Imagery Workstation |
The aircrew arrived in Jefferson City, Sunday, August 7. They were briefed on the Project's objectives, and provided charts of the target areas and graphics of the sites for Monday. The ARCHER sensor operators then entered the flight data and site coordinates in their handheld ARCHER Trac computer in preparation for the morning mission. On Monday, August 8, the aircraft was taxied from the OA hanger to the MoNG hanger, where the ARCHER ground station was off-loaded and set up in the training room. When ARCHER deploys from its home base, all airborne and ground equipment is carried in the aircraft. Extra crewmembers join the aircraft at the deployment site.
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| ARCHER Flight Planning |
The UMC RemoteSensing personnel also set their IMAGINE HSI workstation up in the training room. The HSI data was downloaded from the aircraft to the ARCHER ground station, where Dr. Kershenstine, CAP, ARCHER Project Office, reviewed it for quality and completeness. The data was then be transferred to the IMAGINE workstation to ensure it could be processed and analyzed. The UMC personnel conducted limited review of the imagery on site. All of the analyses for the Project was done using IMAGINE at UMC. A description of the procedures for processing the HSI data by UMC, and the review and analysis with site PMs is described in the final report.
Seven sites were covered on the August 8, morning mission: JZ Landfills, Weldon Spring Site Remedial Action Project, Tyson Valley Powder Farm, Praxair Inc. Industrial Gas Plant Fire, Industrial Flood Sites in St. Louis, Herculaneum Lead Smelter, and Hematite Radiological Site. Transit time from Jefferson City to the St. Louis area was about 45 minutes, making the first mission approximately four hours. It became apparent that cramped conditions in the aircraft and the day's warm temperatures would limit collection for the afternoon flight.
Due to transit times and lighting conditions, the Monday afternoon mission was reduced to a single pass of a portion of the Big River contaminated with lead mine tailings, and area coverage of Mineral Point and Potosi where lead contamination from mining operations has been detected in high levels in residential areas. The aircraft normally flies at 2500 ft, resulting in imagery with a one-meter resolution. A low-level pass was conducted in Potosi to evaluate the application of higher resolution imagery to detection of lower concentrations of contamination.
One mission was flown Tuesday morning to southwest Missouri. The primary sites were three residential areas affected by lead mining. Southwest Missouri, the Tri-State Mining District, is one of three Missouri metal mining locations, each with a different mixture of lead and other metals. The Tri-State area, which includes southeast Kansas and northern Oklahoma, has extensive tailings piles with high concentrations of zinc. Three locations were imaged, Wentworth, Aurora and Grandby. Each location covered an approximately 2 km x 2 km area.
3. Project Results
ARCHER collected imagery of 14 sites with a variety of contamination conditions during the two-day deployment. All of the sites were reviewed by the department's site Project Managers (PM) and University Missouri Columbia (UMC) analysts, and signatures developed, based on PMs' knowledge of site conditions, where feasible. No signature data was obtained through Phase I research. Because of limited funding and time, only those sites with the highest potential for HSI application were examined in detail. Initial processing of the ARCHER output for use in commercial imagery analysis software (ENVI and ERDAS IMAGINE) was more time consuming than anticipated and reduced analytical time. Several site conditions showed immediate potential. However, the initial results need ground truth confirmation before further use. The following are two examples of the analytical work. More detail on these sites and the remaining analysis is provided in the final report.
Potosi Ground Truth
Analysis of the ARCHER data continued throughout the quarter, with one field trip to Potosi to collect ground truth data. ARCHER normally flies at 2,500 ft above ground for one-meter resolution imagery. One pass at a lower altitude was planned for the project to evaluate higher resolution imagery. Sixty-cm was obtained.
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| Figure 1 - Potosi Low Altitude Collection/Concentration Level Analysis | |
The objective was to determine if the higher resolution would help distinguish between low and high concentrations of contaminants, e.g., between 400 and 4,000 parts per million (ppm) lead. Figure 1, left side, is a clip of the single low altitude pass along hwy 185 in Potosi. The right side, is a clip of detailed analysis of the Potosi fairgrounds. Instead of the single yellow color used in other analyses, highlighting the closest correlated signatures, a range of colors was used to show the gradual widening of the angle of correlation between exact and no correlation. Red shows areas that are the closest match to the signature, developed from the source identified by the PM, with yellow, green, cyan and purple showing areas that were progressively further from a matching signature.
Additional graphics of other areas in Potosi and the concentration range analysis are provided in the Final Report.
On November 17, Shawn Muenks and Nick Carbone, Federal Facilities Section, took the imagery of Potosi, both low and high altitude images, and a Field Portable Xray Fluoroscope (FPXRF) to collect readings of surface metals in the source area and the areas analyzed by UMC. UMC also provided coordinates for red, yellow, cyan and purple areas for ground truth. Unfortunately, some of the areas with coordinates provided by UMC were not accessible or had changed due to construction since the August flight. Figure 2 is the fairgrounds at the intersection of highways 185 and 8. The left clip is the imagery analysis, and the right clip is the results of FPXRF sampling. The main fairground area, where UMC had provided coordinates, was not accessible.
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| Figure 2 - Potosi Low Altitude Collection/Ground Truth Data Collection | |
FPXRF readings were then taken from either side of the fairgrounds, the fairgrounds parking and an Ameren UE equipment storage area, using land features and the color-coding. The right clip shows the readings for iron (Fe) and lead (Pb) in ppm. Most of the areas that should have been high in lead were not above 1,000 ppm as expected although the paved entrance to the fairgrounds parking was 1,400 and 1,800 ppm, probably from the use of tailings for aggregate in the asphalt and roadbed. However, we did record high iron readings, in access of 10,000 ppm. An iron level of 23,000 ppm or above is of concern. Subsequent collection at the source also provided readings that were low in lead and high in iron. This may indicate that, although the source area was a mining waste pile, the surface of the source area was not reflective of the buried waste. The results further emphasized the need to collect spectrometer readings of the contaminated areas of interest concurrently with the airborne collections, so that the results are reflective of the contamination of interest. Additional graphics and analysis of the Potosi ground truth work are provided in the Final Report.
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| Figure 3 - Praxair Endmember Analysis |
Praxair Fire Analysis
Several other sites were analyzed using different methods of imagery processing, which are presented in the Final Report. An endmember analysis was used on the Praxair tank farm fire in St. Louis. The Praxair tank farm fire provided an opportunity for ad hoc collection against an Environmental Emergency Response (EER) related site. Many of the compressed gas tanks that exploded contained asbestos. EPA's ASPECT aircraft tracked the plume of chemicals from the fire, and the aircrew provided EER personnel a plot of the area covered by the plume. The ARCHER HSI was collected 45 days later with the objective of assessing the sensor's ability to determine the extent of asbestos dispersal. By the time ARCHER flew, much of the asbestos had already been cleaned up in the area plotted by ASPECT. UMC conducted a preliminary analysis of the affected area using an endmember classification routine. Figure 3 shows the results of the endmember analysis. The classification identified areas within the known contaminated area that matched the predominant signature from the tank farm. It also identified areas outside the search area. John Whitaker, EER, reviewed the Praxair imagery on September 29. Due to the progress of the cleanup, no sampling or further ground truth efforts were undertaken. However, the process does indicate a potential application of HSI for this type EER response, particularly if conducted in conjunction with EPA's ASPECT real-time support.
Additional analysis of Pilot Project HSI is provided in the Final Report.
4. Final Report
The following is the OSWER Hyperspectral Imagery Pilot Project and attachments. The attachments are provided separately because of the size of the files. If you have any questions, you can contact the Project Manager, Nick Carbone, Missouri Department of Natural Resources,
573-751-2506.
Note: The following report and attachments are large files that may not display in a browser. It is recommended that the briefs be downloaded. Downloading by right clicking on the image and select "Save target as" or "Save link as," etc.
