NASA-JPL/ECOSTRESS

NASA’s ECOSTRESS mission on the International Space Station was designed to measure evaporative plant stress on a near-global scale. We propose a novel way to use ECOSTRESS thermal data to investigate thermal hotspots in soils and rocks at the Earth’s surface. These thermal anomalies are important in the reconnaissance of new geothermal resources, a vital source in the global energy transition towards a more sustainable energy supply. The aim of this proposed work is to optimize the geothermal temperature anomaly detection from space by using a different and novel approach. We will look at the nighttime temperature decay rates in time series, rather than temperatures in individual time slices. This approach will provide hypothetical stabilization temperatures at the end of cooling, even if that stable temperature is not reached at the end of the night for a given pixel. The proposed approach will side-step two issues that current state-of-the-art methodologies are struggling to handle: 1) the effect of solar heating and starting temperature at the beginning of the night are inconsequential for our result, as our focus is on decay rates rather than on absolute temperatures, and 2) variations of thermal inertia in the geologic substrate are controlled by looking at the stable end temperature which are inertia independent. In order to reconstruct the nighttime cooling patterns for each image pixel, we propose to merge data from the unique precessing ECOSTRESS orbit (different acquisition times on different overpass days) with data from geostationary weather satellites. This merged product will provide a super-temporal resolution time series, with the high spatial details from ECOSTRESS and the high temporal details from the weather satellites. This study will investigate for the first time the nighttime cooling dynamics of the geologic substrate in ECOSTRESS images, and assess its potential for improved near-global geothermal anomaly detection.