Henry Coe Park in Santa Clara County is big: 87,000 acres of former ranch land, dotted with oak trees, meadows that burst with wildflowers each spring, and vast stretches of chaparral. Given that Coe is nestled near Silicon Valley, it makes sense that the retirees who volunteer here bring a certain technical bent to their appreciation of the place.

Case in point: the Lick Fire of September 2007 (Craig Miller reported on it for The California Report). Named the Lick Fire after it was first spotted from the nearby Lick Observatory, the wildfire burned 47,760 acres in the Mt. Hamilton Range by the time it was contained, eight days later.

Since then, citizen scientists who volunteer for the park have been paying close attention to see how the burned land bounces back. In particular: Bob Patrie, a former project manager in Silicon Valley, and Winslow Briggs, Director Emeritus at Carnegie Institution of Washington’s Department of Plant Biology. Together, they’ve pored over satellite imagery to document the impact of the fire on various plant communities in Coe Park.

They used data from the Landsat 5 satellite (before it failed last November). There have been seven Landsats, each designed to provide overlapping coverage of nearly the entire surface of the earth on a regular basis.

Patrie and Briggs zeroed in on a technique for determining the severity of wildfires known as Normalized Burn Ratio, or NBR.

Patrie explains that the chlorophyll in growing plants soaks up red and blue light to maintain photosynthesis, but reflects infrared light to keep from overheating. “This pattern of reflectance is unique to growing green plants. Thus the difference in reflectivity between near-infrared and visible red light from any particular patch of land (NIR-RED) is strongly correlated to the level of photosynthesis from that same patch.”

Patrie and Briggs decided to study four plant communities:

• Mixed chaparral
• Gray pine oak woodland
• Mixed oak woodland
• Ponderosa woodland

“These communities are not mono cultures, nor was the burn intensity uniform over each area,” Patrie says. Just so, they found something interesting: plant life bouncing back after a fire, “tops off” at the same point as before the fire. “You can see that there’s an intrinsic limitation to the amount of any given plant in any given territory,” says Patrie. “It’s true in each kind of ecosystem.”

What they haven’t been able to answer is why bulb flowers “just went crazy” after the fire. Briggs says “Native Americans knew that. They’d do a burn, then harvest the bulbs, some of which are edible.” But the question remains, “What signals to the bulb to flower? The smell of smoke?”

That’s a question they’re still exploring–and can explore further, now that it’s clear the park will stay open, a story told on The California Report on Monday.

Explore KQED’s entire series, “California’s State Parks: On the Rocks,” at our special coverage page.

nasa hq/Flickr

Launch of the NPP satellite from Vandenberg Air Force Base on Friday.

In a joint effort to improve observations of the Earth from space, NASA and NOAA launched a new satellite on Friday from Vandenberg Air Force base near Lompoc, CA. The satellite carries with it a suite of next-generation technologies and tools that the agencies say will enable scientists to continue monitoring climate change and weather patterns as many existing Earth-observing satellites are reaching the outer edge of their life expectancies.

The new satellite is part of the NPOESS Preparatory Project (NPP), which aims to monitor the entire planet, collecting and processing data on the Earth’s weather, atmosphere, oceans, land, and near-space environment.  The agencies say this data will not only help with monitoring climate change, but also with natural disaster prediction and planning, and military strategies.  NASA describes the NPP as a bridge between the aging Earth Observation System (EOS) satellites and the “forthcoming” Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) satellites, which are scheduled to begin launching in 2016.

NASA lists the key science objectives and capabilities of NPP as the following:

• Climate change — contribute to long-term records of global environmental data critical for understanding the dynamics of climate change
• Health of the ozone layer — daily measurements of the atmospheric ozone layer that will determine whether the ozone layer is recovering as expected
• Natural disasters — monitor wildfires, volcanic eruptions, snowstorms, droughts, floods, hurricanes and dust plumes
• Weather predictions — a sounding instrument will collect information about cloud cover, atmospheric temperatures, humidity and other variables critical to accurate weather prediction
• Vegetation — map global land vegetation and quantify changes in plant productivity to understand the global carbon cycle and monitor agricultural processes to predict and respond to food shortages and famines
• Global ice cover — monitor changes to Earth’s sea ice, land ice and glaciers to track the pace of climate change
• Air pollution — monitor the spread of health-sapping pollutants such as soot, particulate matter, nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide
• Temperatures — maintain a global record of atmospheric, land surface and sea surface temperatures critical to understanding the long-term dynamics of climate change
• Earth’s energy budget — make measurements to determine how much energy is entering and exiting Earth’s atmosphere

As The New York Times and Popular Mechanics report, it’s been a bumpy road getting the NPP program off the ground, and the budget for future satellites and launches is far from secure in the current economic climate.  Too long a delay, scientists warn, could affect not just the nation’s ability to monitor climate change, but could also impact weather prediction and natural disaster preparedness.

For more about the NPP satellite, check out this video from Space.com

Or, if you’d rather have it explained to you by a cartoon polar bear, you can watch this NASA video for the basics: