Technology Transfer

The First of Earth Science's New Initiatives

NASA HAS SELECTED NINE INSTITUTIONS FOR the first of many initiatives that will utilize a decade's worth of Earth science research and data to solve and mitigate large-scale practical and societal problems. Seven Regional Earth Science Applications Centers (RESACs) will use NASA's Earth science results, technologies and data products to help resolve issues with regional economic and policy significance and to support regional assessments supporting the U.S. Global Change Research Program. The RESACs are formed by nine public/private consortia from throughout the United States.

The RESACs will apply state-of-the-art NASA Earth science research results to such diverse areas as precision farm management, forest growth and health monitoring, regional water resources and hydrology, impact assessment of long-term climate variability and change, land cover and land use mapping, agricultural crop disease and infestation detection, fire hazards management, watershed and coastal management, environmental monitoring and primary and secondary science education.

The centers, selected by NASA's Office of Earth Science, will be composed of "end-to-end" consortia (from defining user needs to product delivery) and will include members from the research community, private industry, public agencies and other potential information users in the public and private sectors. The selected consortia involve more than 20 private companies, about 10 state and local government agencies, 20 federal agency regional offices and 15 universities.

One RESAC will address water management problems in the arid southwestern United States. Using hydrologic models derived from NASA-sponsored research, the RESAC will use spaceborne and airborne instruments to provide improved information on water resource availability. This information will assist planners in developing strategies for resource allocation among competing economic and environmental uses in a rapidly evolving global economy.

"Regional-scale problems are well suited to NASA's Earth science data and technology. No other system of observation is available for analyzing such large-scale issues," said Dr. Ghassem Asrar, Associate Administrator for Earth Science at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. "This program will capitalize on the science and technology developed over the past decade by NASA's Earth Science Enterprise to provide solutions to practical and societal problems that exist today and help in mitigating them in the future."

"The selection of the RESACs is the first of a number of planned NASA initiatives to develop new methods for bringing together the research, service and user communities to apply NASA's research results to practical, near-term problems," added Alex Tuyahov, manager of the Earth Science Applications Research Program at NASA Headquarters.

The three-year grants for RESACs will utilize NASA's extensive Earth science program, a long-term effort to study human-induced and natural changes in the whole Earth system.

For more information, contact David E. Steitz at NASA Headquarters.
Call: 202/358-1730, Fax: 202/358-4210, E-mail: dsteitz@hq.nasa.gov
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NASA-selected consortia will use remote sensing to provide solutions to large-scale economical, environmental and societal issues and problems through Landsat images such as this one of the Louisiana/ Mississippi gulf coast area.