LAWRENCE — I launched a balloon into the air. It fell to earth I knew not where But it gave a Johnson County lady quite a scare. When she looked up and saw it in a tree up there. Or at least until some Kansas University geography students showed up to retrieve it and the little silver box it carried. It’s a part of Project GeoHawk and an aerial remote-sensing class. The students launch high-altitude balloons with cameras and global-positioning systems for research projects, said KU geography lecturer Kevin Dobbs, lecturer and project coordinator with the Kansas Biological Survey. “They looked at things like identifying building footprints, evaluating the percentage of impervious cover, which can relate to water quantity and quality issues,” Dobbs said. “Some students looked at a variety of images taken at different altitudes to characterize the atmospheric component of the images, because as you get higher and higher, the scattering of the atmosphere adds a component to the signal of the image.” Check the Web site projectgeohawk.blogspot.com.
Thursday, May 26, 1:30 p.m.
