The Centers for Transformative Environmental Monitoring Programs (CTEMPs) is a community user facility operated jointly by the University of Nevada, Reno and Oregon State University  supporting scientific discovery in earth science. CTEMPs strives to provide measurement of critical earth science processes at the ?next generation? of spatial and temporal scales. The focus of CTEMPs from 2014 through 2019 was concentrated in two areas: design and delivery of fiber-optic based distributed temperature sensing (DTS) for applications in earth sciences and the development and deployment of small unmanned aircraft systems (sUAS) to image the earth?s surface. Fiber-optic based temperature sensing now allows researchers to monitor the temperature of water, air and soil every 10-20 cm along the optical fiber which can be as long at 50 kilometers.  sUAS platforms developed at CTEMPs can resolve topographic and vegetation changes at the centimeter scale, with repeatability far more quickly and less costly than traditional airborne or satellite remote sensing.

As a community user facility, instrumentation and support services are made available to federally supported researchers as well as state, local and limited private industry. Instruments are provided to researchers at a fraction of the cost of purchase and these instruments are in almost continuous use. CTEMPs provides extensive education and training on its instruments through workshops, individual on-site training, remote consulting support, on-site direct assistance, and extensive on-line resources such as calibration programs and literature. CTEMPs operates 12 field deployable fiber optic DTS systems capable of remote operation and autonomous function and eight sUAS to conduct photography, near infrared imaging, hyperspectral imaging and thermal imaging. CTEMPs is jointly operated by the University of Nevada, Reno and the Oregon State University with additional instrumentation contributions from Smith College.

During this reporting period, CTEMPs supported 82 individual DTS deployment projects, spanning 6 continents.  Twenty-three (23) unmanned aircraft projects were supported and collectively resulted in the publication of 83 peer-reviewed journal articles.  Instrumentation was supplied to researchers supported by the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, NASA, U.S. Forest Service, NOAA and various state agencies and universities. CTEMPs personnel trained over 275 students and researchers in formal workshops over the period, including for the first time, support of the ?Summer of Applied Geophysics Experience? field training camp with over 35 students. 

The use of DTS for earth science research has grown extensively in recent years, with CTEMPs supporting projects focusing on surface water and groundwater exchange, groundwater flow in fracture aquifers, lake and ocean dynamics, atmospheric boundary layer mixing and soil moisture dynamics as well as many other topical areas.

An area of extensive use of CTEMPs fiber optic instrumentation has been the study of internal boundary layers in lakes and oceans.  CTEMPs supported work in the Dead Sea, Lake Shasta, Lake Chelan, Foster Reservoir, The South China Sea, and off the coast of California, resulting in at least 5 publications, with several more in preparation.  The ability to provide dynamic observation across km length scales has revolutionized these observations, representing a game-changing technology with CTEMPs supporting essentially all of the teams employing this method

DTS has also been widely adopted in glaciology, with extensive applications in Polar regions.  Fisher et al. (2015), working on sub-glacial lakes in the Antarctic utilized CTEMPs instrumentation and support to record, for the first time, the geothermal heat flux that is critical for the formation of sub-glacial Lake Whillans. Figure 1 shows the DTS derived temperature profile in 750 meters of ice overlying Lake Whillans, and documenting an elevated heat flux both from beneath the lake, but also within the overlying ice. The DTS provided over 700 measurements of temperature within the glacier without the need for individual sensors.

Unmanned aircraft, (commonly referred to as ?drones?) offer another significant advantages for imaging and monitoring the earth surface processes such as flooding and erosion, vegetation stress and evaporation. Using computer advances in image processing, topographic maps with centimeter scale resolution can now easily be obtained to assess flood risk, earthquake fault motion, water and pest-stress in crops as well as many other land surface processes.  As part of the NSF?s Critical Zone Observatory, CTEMPs supported sUAS overflights to assess land surface erosion at the Intensively Managed Landscape Observatory in Iowa.  Imagery detected micro-erosion features at scales less than 1 cm that were completely unrecognizable from ground observation (Wilson et al. 2018). Using the same CTEMPs imaging system, Kratt et al., (2019) demonstrated the ability to detect subsurface drainage structures used to reduce field flooding. While the drains are up to a meter below the land surface, Figure 2 clearly shows the linear features related to soil surface drying directly above the drain pipes. This work demonstrated, for the first time, that drains could easily be identified remotely and also demonstrated that active drains could be distinguished from clogged or failed drains.

Last Modified: 03/08/2020
Modified by: Scott W Tyler