THERMOGRAPHIC UAV PROJECT

Lloyd (Pete) Coulter of SDSU’s Geography department was helping get the always wonderful Eva Coleman some stick time on their TIR (thermal IR) drone and asked me along. Eva’s going to teach high school students drone operations at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory's Secondary School Field Research Program (SSFRP) at Columbia University over the summer.

I took the opportunity to grab the data and process it in Metashape then loaded the rasters into ArcGIS Pro to look at surface temperatures in the test area. Here are the steps:

•  Run Miro Rava’s DJI Image Processor on the DJI Thermal Infra-Red (TIR) images to create radiometric rasters (tifs) (a great piece of software!)

•  Import Thermal IR images, radiometric rasters, and RGB files into Agisoft Metashape

•  Create orthomosaics from above datasets

•  Import three orthomosaics into ArcGIS Pro

•  Run raster calculator on the radiometric raster to create new raster in Fahrenheit (ugh, Imperial units!)

I then organize the radiometric raster on the top of the RGB raster and turn the former’s layer transparency to 100%, which allows one to visually select features on the (RGB) ground features and get a popup with the temperature.

A great opportunity to apply practical workflows and collaborate with talented colleagues in the field!