Month: May 2010

POLS22 Final Paper: Filene’s Redevelopment

This was my final paper for POLS0220: City Politics.  Our assignment was to pick a city issue, follow newspaper articles about it over the semester, and then analyze it with our developing understanding of city politics.  I chose to look at the stalled redevelopment of the site of the old Filene’s in Downtown Crossing.

Blight at the Bargain Bin: The Fight to Redevelop Boston’s Filene’s Department Store

The mayor finally put his foot down.  In an open letter, he blasted the billionaire real estate developer for his comments earlier that week: “I am directing the Boston Redevelopment Authority to examine eminent domain options for the One Franklin Street site. . . This development is too important to Downtown Crossing and to the entire City of Boston to be used as a bargaining chip to improve your bottom line.”  Having just been sworn in for an unprecedented fifth term as Mayor of Boston, Thomas Michael Menino came out swinging. Continue reading POLS22 Final Paper: Filene’s Redevelopment

GEOL133 Final Paper: Providence’s Urban Heat Island

This was my final paper for GEOL1330: Global Environmental Remote Sensing, where I used ASTER thermal infrared data to quantify the urban heat island of Providence, RI.

Providence’s Urban Heat Island: An Analysis with ASTER and Thermal Truthing

Abstract

Understanding the urban heat island is critical for public health officials, urban planners and policymakers as they shape the future of cities. In this study, thermal infrared ASTER data is used to characterize the nature of the urban heat island in Providence, Rhode Island and how it relates to vegetation coverage. Temperatures in the downtown area on a 22°C August night are found to be approximately 2°C warmer than nearby suburban areas, and 3°C warmer than the closest rural areas. Temperatures are found to be inversely correlated with vegetation coverage as calculated using NDVI. Historical air temperatures are used to ground-truth the thermal data. These values are within the 1.5°C range of precision for the advanced AST_08 product, which takes surface emissivity into account, in eight of ten scenes. The AST_04 product, which does not take surface emissivity into account, severely underestimated air temperature in all cases.
Continue reading GEOL133 Final Paper: Providence’s Urban Heat Island

Block Island Field Trip

For my remote sensing class, we went on a ground-truthing trip to Block Island. In lab, we each did a region-of-interest supervised classification of some IKONOS data. The purpose of the field trip was to assess the accuracy of our classification. We lucked out on the date of the field trip and got perfect weather: clear skies and high 70s.

Using a few of the photos from Sachem Pond, I made my first panorama (Photoshop did most/all of the work). Considering I just used the automatic warp and default settings, it came out really nicely.

Sachem Pond, Block Island

Check out the rest of the photos below: