Landsats Aff

Landsats 1AC

Ranking Member Jim Moran (D-VA) agreed “strongly” with the chairman’s points. He argued that the Landsat transfer included in the “deeply troubling” budget request does not make sense and that the proposed elimination of 230 full time employee positions is not acceptable. USGS Director Marcia McNutt began her statement with a description of USGS efforts that led to the safe capping and sealing of the runaway well in the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf last year. She expressed her sympathy to the Japanese people in the wake of a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and subsequent tsunami off the coast of Japan on March 11 that has caused severe devastation. She commended Japan for being the most advanced nation in the world in terms of earthquake hazards preparation and reduction. McNutt defended the Landsat program changes, comparing USGS’s proposed role to the responsibility that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has of its weather satellites. Representative Moran began by asking McNutt whether the $48 million increase to the Landsat program and the proposed future increases will come at the expense of vital USGS biological and geologic programs, such as mapping. McNutt agreed that USGS will need to communicate with the administration to ensure that a growing Landsat program would not “erode” the core missions of USGS. She told the committee that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) told USGS that the cuts in the FY 2012 request were not associated with the Landsat increase, though Representative Moran responded that the OMB claim could not be true. Chairman Simpson agreed that with added responsibility, USGS should have received additional funding from NASA’s budget. He recommended that USGS investigate extending the operational lifetime of Landsat 8, which is set to launch in December 2012, in order to delay the launches of Landsats 9 and 10. The extra time would allow USGS to resolve this budgetary issue, he suggested.

Plan – The United States federal government should guarantee funding for the National Land Imaging Program to maintain multiple operational Landsat satellites
Advantage 1 is Water –
Landsat data key to water managements – solves water management, increasing efficiency and reducing international conflict

Rocchio 7 (Laura, Senior Outreach Scientist at Science Systems and Applications, MA from U Baltimore, cites Richard Allen, PhD, PE Professor, Water Resources Engineering, NASA, April 17, http://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/news/news-archive/soc_0011.html, accessed 7-3-11, JMB)

Conserving water with Landsat Increased demand for scarce water supplies has shifted water management strategy from increasing water supply to innovatively managing water use at sustainable levels. To more effectively allocate limited water supplies, water resources managers must understand water consumption patterns over large geographic areas. Detailed water consumption maps can be made quickly and easily with Landsat because of its 30 m spatial resolution and thermal imaging capability. Landsat has been proclaimed “the best and least expensive way to quantify and locate where water is used and in what quantity,” by Anthony Morse and Richard Allen, two water management specialists from Idaho. Former World Bank economist, Dr. Chris Perry, predicts that, “We may expect significant improvements in the productivity of water—the crop per drop—by the analysis and debate facilitated by better data.” Landsat data have been used successfully not only to quantify water consumed by irrigation, but also to establish water rights, to facilitate the transfer of water entitlements, and to estimate aquifer depletions and quantify net ground-water pumpage in areas where water extraction from underground is not measured. Understanding Landsat's role Landsat data, including visible, near infrared, mid-infrared, and thermal information, for a particular geographic region are fed into a relatively sophisticated energy balance model that outputs evapotranspiration maps. Evapotranspiration (ET) refers to the conversion of water into water vapor by the dual process of evaporation from the soil and transpiration (the escape of water though plant’s stomata). For vegetated land, ET is synonymous with water consumption. Maps of water consumption made with moderate resolution Landsat data enable water resources managers and administrators to determine how much water was consumed from individual fields. And, because the spatial nature of Landsat data lends itself to the monitoring of seasonal evapotranspiration trends, managers can use the information to determine which complex irrigation schedules should be pursued and how to time water releases from dams. “Remote sensing, applied to the measurement of ET over large areas, provides analysts of irrigation systems with extraordinary