USGS Grant will Fund Research in San Francisco Bay
Emmanuel Boss, professor of oceanography, received a $23,445 U.S. Department of the Interior (USGS) grant for the proposal, “Suspended sediments in the San Francisco Bay: Algorithm development and validation.” The objective is to map the nearshore magnitude and distribution of suspended sediments in the Suisun/Grizzly Bay region of the San Francisco Bay — as close to the shoreline of Rush Ranch as possible. In their approach, Boss’ research team will use several remote sensing platforms — airplanes and satellites — with fine-scale spatial resolution to alleviate land adjacency effects. Employing a suite of different fine-scale platforms will increase the possibility of successful overflight imagery collection, since fine-scale remote sensors do not have advantageous return times. This approach will demonstrate the utility of using remotely sensed suspended sediments for providing input into a model for regions where continuous monitoring of turbidity may not exist or where discrete suspended sediment values are not available.