#11 – Katreen Wilkstrom-Jones and Jill Nicolazzo
July 29th, 2024
Editor’s note: Any use of trade, product, or firm names by U.S. Geological Survey employees is for descriptive purposes only and does not imply endorsement by the U.S. Government.
Announcer: Welcome to the LIDAR Magazine Podcast, bringing measurement, positioning and imaging technologies to light. This event was made possible thanks to the generous support of rapidlasso, producer of the LAStools software suite.
Austin Madson: Hey everyone and welcome to the LIDAR Magazine Podcast series. My name is Austin Madson. I’m an associate editor here at LIDAR Magazine, and I’ve recently started supporting Stewart with the podcast, because there are just too many exciting topics that we want to cover. So have a listen to a recently released LIDAR Magazine Podcast where Stewart has gone for a quick introductory podcast episode to get a better feel for who I am and what I’m about.
But at any rate, today we’re happy to have two guests from the Alaska Department of Natural Resources and the Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys or DGGS. And that’s Katreen Wilkstrom-Jones and Jill Nicolazzo. So let’s go ahead and get to it. Katreen works as a research scientist in the Geohazard Section of the Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys, or DGGS. Her work is focused on the prediction and mitigation of climate and cross sphere hazards in Alaska using a combination of in situ field measurements, remote sensing, geospatial analysis, weather and climate data as well as numerical modeling.
Katreen’s educational background focused on investigating snow avalanche releases and flow behaviors using remote sensing and numerical modeling techniques. A large portion of Katreen’s work at DGGS over the past seven and a half years or so has consisted of the collection, the processing as well as the analysis of aerial lidar data. So welcome Katreen.
Jill graduated from the University of Alaska Fairbanks with a degree in geological engineering. And her background is in geotech engineering. She joined the Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys two years ago when the Landslide Hazards Program began. The Landslide Hazards Program is focused on identifying and mapping landslides as well as modeling the susceptibility of communities to landslide hazards all across the state of Alaska.
Prior to being hired at DGGS Jill worked for about five years at the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities where she managed their Unstable Slopes Program. So welcome to Jill and welcome to Katreen. We’re excited to have you on board.
Jill Nicolazzo: Thanks for having us Austin.
Austin Madson: So Jill, why don’t you go ahead and kick things off. Can you talk a little bit about what Landslide Hazards Program actually entails, and in particular, what are the kind of overarching goals of the program? And how do you and your colleagues seek to achieve those goals?
Jill Nicolazzo: Yeah, so the Landslide Hazards Program launched exactly two years ago now. Before that landslide work borrowed people from other programs, such as Katrina’s Climate and Biosphere seismic hydrologists. In this last couple of years we’ve been working to create a single map of known landslides across the state by reviewing existing geology maps and looking for landslides that were already mapped and then compiling them into a single database.
So far we’ve reviewed over 1000 maps and something 350 of them had at least one identified landslide or debris flow or rock fall. Started using the word “landslide” generically to cover everybody. Soil deflection is a big one on the north slope that’s also been mapped. Beyond that we’re tasked with mapping new landslides as they occur. We’re finding those that have not already been mapped but we know exist. And then on a sort of community basis, we are slowly working on estimating susceptibility to landslides and debris flows for communities across the states.
Austin Madson: Yeah, that’s great. It seems like from our discussion over the last month or so that Landslide Hazards Program is still kind of young and in its infancy, right. It started I guess when you came on board to DGGS a handful of years ago. And so that said, right, we know that Alaska is a large state. It’s the largest state in the US. And it begs the question, how does the Landslide Hazards Program in particular determine its focus? Is the goal to kind of go out and map and monitor all the landslides across the state of Alaska? How do you focus on specific areas or regions? I know you had mention Jill that you’ve gone through 1000 different maps.
Jill Nicolazzo: Yeah, no, you’re absolutely right. It is a large state, and there are just two of us. So we do have to focus on specific things. Most of the mapping that we’ve done historically, both at DGGS and USGS, the US Geological Survey, has been based on other, yeah, quadrangles or transportation corridors. Basically places where there are people or resources. So a lot of the state hasn’t been covered very much at all.
We’d like to get to those areas, but that’s a little farther down the line. So far the program has been a little big reactionary. A lot of the drive to start the program began with the deadly landslide in Sitka in 2015. And then there was another one in Haines in 2020 and 2 projects were developed after the Haines landslide that were sort of handed to the Landslide Program 2 years ago when we first started. So we’re just sort of building at the moment on things that have already happened and that people have already proposed. The Haines ones are wrapping up here shortly. But then we had another landslide in Wrangell just last November that has also prompted another reactionary sort of response where we are getting some funding from FEMA to do mapping of the Wrangell area. Hopefully, it’s still in the proposal phase, but hopefully we’ll get it. {Laughs} We have a really good chance.
Katreen Wilkstrom-Jones: We need to.
Jill Nicolazzo: We do. Yeah, so aside from those big emergency events though we get a lot of funding from the USGS that has been focused on the Prince Williams Sound area for the most part because of the Barry Arm landslide. But now this new contract has broadened out to all of Southeast Alaska because well, the most recent deadly landslides anyways have all occurred in Southeast. So yeah, eventually we will get to where we can deal with them community by community. But so far it’s an as needed when something happens basis.
Austin Madson: Right, yeah, and that totally makes sense, right. Put your resources where they’re most useful. Well, you mentioned a couple of projects there Jill. Can you talk a little bit about the Haines work and the actual deformation or displacement that occurred there and why it was important and how your team and your colleagues sought out to better understand what happened there?
Jill Nicolazzo: Yeah, so the Haines event was actually triggered by a large storm in early December 2020 that – Katrina was actually there for. She flew some of the lidar during that response. As with most of our landslides, it was a saturated soil situation along with melting snow. Because of course at that point there was snow on the ground, that just caused flooding and re-flows across a large portion of Southeast. And Haines just happened to be the one that had houses destroyed and two lives were lost.
So that sort of became the focus. But it was a much broader event. So with the lidar, Katrina and others that collected – in the days after the event we were able to see the landslide scarp and the flanks and the deposit. And so now with the project beyond emergency response we have attempted to match that landslide and apply it across the broader area to try to determine if there are similar characteristics, similar slopes that could be susceptible to the same sort of failure if another rain event were to occur.
Austin Madson: I see. You all must have had some pre-event lidar, is that right?
Jill Nicolazzo: We did. We had some from 2014 that was collected for something else entirely of course. But it did give us a baseline comparison.
Katreen Wilkstrom-Jones: Yeah, I think it was collected by (inaudible) Spatial back in 2014. So that was really good that we had some initial background information for older previous event, available information. But we ended up flying it again the following summer to get a full coverage. But yeah, like Jill said, we did fly it right in the aftermath of the main landslide event there in early December of 2020. And that was just to get that immediate information and aerial sort of understanding of the damage that had been done. And it was very revealing with that work and analyzing the lidar data right away. Was that the hill slope where the main landslide occurred along Beach Road, we saw numerous historical or ancient landslides hiding under the tree canopy. And that area when it was developed for houses to build on, I it hadn’t really undergone any geotechnical assessment prior. So it was very important information for the bureau.
Austin Madson: So it seems like you are getting decent canopy penetration from at least that pre-lidar dataset that allows you to see those historic lobes.
Katreen Wilkstrom-Jones: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it was of sufficient resolution the older one, and the one that we collected was very high resolution. So yeah, we got some good data there.
Jill Nicolazzo: We do have a small window in the fall where the snow has melted enough to get the upper elevations, and the leaves have fallen off enough to be able to penetrate through. But it’s a small window some years.
Austin Madson: Or non-existent in others I’m sure.
Katreen Wilkstrom-Jones: And the Haines, I mean, the Haines event was historical in the sense that it was a 500 year precipitation event.
Austin Madson: Wow.
Katreen Wilkstrom-Jones: We got over 10 inches in 24 hours, and I believe over 14 inches in 48 hours. So that amount of rain had never been recorded in Haines before. And like Jill mentioned, it fell on top of a snowpack. So adding that melt, the soil’s completely saturated.
Austin Madson: Yeah, and rain on snow events are really quite different, right, than just rain based events. And I have a felling you all know that all too well up there.
Katreen Wilkstrom-Jones: Yeah, absolutely. So we get snow usually fairly early on here in Alaska. Sometimes September we can get the first snowfall. With those fall storms the landslide risk really goes up during the fall. So we see these events typically during the fall months, November even December. And then later on in the winter we can oftentimes get some warmer storms in January, for example. And rain on snow during that month, falling on a much deeper snowpack, we tend to see really large avalanches. One example is the Keystone Canyon avalanche that occurred in 2016 outside of Valdez. And it blocked up the Lowe River and City of Valdez was disconnected from the road system for over a week. So yeah, these are really detrimental, the rain on snow events.
Austin Madson: Well, that kind of leads me into my next question for Katreen here. I recently read an interesting report titled, Assessing the Powder Cloud Impact on Electrical Transmission Lines at Snowslide Creek Avalanche Path in Southeast Alaska. In which you’re the lead author there of course. So can you talk a little bit about this work and how lidar in particular was used? Who were your partners or stakeholders or end users and things like that?
Katreen Wilkstrom-Jones: Yeah, absolutely. I want to look back at that event and thinking about it as kind of the golden opportunity for using lidar and using the data derived from lidar. We had opportunity there to fly lidar right before artillery mission to manually trigger an avalanche. This is outside of Juneau in Southeast Alaska along Thane Road. And that road connects a residential neighborhood to the rest of Juneau. And there’s also the powerline corridor going along this road.
So we worked closely there with both Department of Transportation and Alaska Electric and Power. So those two are our main partners for that stretch. And they had notified us that they were going to shoot this avalanche path. This is an avalanche path at Snowslide Creek. It goes pretty much annually and hits the road almost annually as well. So it’s a frequent avalanche path, and it produces very large avalanches as well.
So anyway, they let us know that they were about to shoot. We had a weather window so we could (sounds like: modelize) and get down there to Southeast Alaska. So we flew lidar the day before they were going to shoot. And they shot in the morning the following day, and then we were able to fly it again right after, that same afternoon. So we got really excellent volume data from this avalanche that could really delineate the outline of the runout and all of that. And this event was also video recorded, so we got really good information there. The flow behavior and the powder cloud development and all of that.
And this avalanche was a mixed avalanche. So it had a powder cloud associated with it, but also a dense wet core. So snow temperatures were actually above freezing when it occurred. So it was a really interesting event, and it took out the power line. I don’t recall exactly how many days they were out of power there. They had a backup line, but one of the main lines got taken out. So it was a costly event, right, for the electric company.
Yeah, so we used the data then from our two surveys where we got good snow depth information since we had a pretty end post collection there and could use that information as input into our numerical model that we use. Which is the Rapid Mass Movement or RAMMS, an extended version of that model. And we could reconstruct the avalanche that way. So this study that you’re referring to that we presented at the International Snow Science Workshop in Bend last fall, that study focused on the reconstruction of this event and some sort of estimates of what the powder cloud impact may have been during that event.
And what we’re working on now, and this is part of a project that we have going on with the University of Alaska Fairbanks, focusing on sort of future avalanche scenarios and then adding experiments, experimental simulations in our numerical model to see kind of what happens if we were to have an even warmer snowpack or different volumes, different snow depths in the path that the avalanche couldn’t (sounds like: train). Like, how would that impact the runoff and impact pressures and so forth? So it’s a really nice project and we keep working closely with our partners there in Juneau because they have a lot going on.
Austin Madson: Yeah, it’s really interesting too, right, because it seems like one of the big goals here is to get a better sense for what kind of snowpack and weather patterns will actually have a negative impact or cause an impact on those utility lines running through there. And the hopes that maybe the bombing can occur in periods where that doesn’t happen to kind of mitigate that, is that right?
Katreen Wilkstrom-Jones: Yes to some extent you can certainly kind of shut off the snowpack by bombing beforehand, artificially trigger avalanches that way. But wet snow is really tricky, and it’s not always very responsive to some of those loads. And we’re curious about what may happen in the future with a potentially warmer climate and also potentially shifting wind patterns. This Thane Road corridor is interesting in the sense that a lot of avalanches do not necessarily occur right during a storm. But might be more sort of after the storm when we have really strong outflow winds that are redistributing the snow on that slope. So we’re very interested in the wind patterns in this area as well and yeah, in general changes in the snowpack. Less snow doesn’t always mean shorter runoff, for example, if that snow is warmer. That can mean longer runoff. So there is a lot of complexities to consider there.
Austin Madson: Yeah, well, hopefully the data that you’ll have acquired for that project can help answer some of those really important questions. And to kind of follow up with that, I know Katreen you have some other ongoing projects using multitemporal or repeat lidar acquisitions to kind of look at avalanches and how that may affect other critical infrastructure in the state. Can you kind of talk a little bit about those efforts? What kind of infrastructure are you all concerned about? I know you mentioned utility corridors. What data are you guys collecting?
Katreen Wilkstrom-Jones: So in our group we have focused a lot on collecting snow distribution data. And that typically occurs near peak snow height. So here in Alaska depending which region you’re looking at, but typically around mid or late March even into early, mid April. And so we tried to fly fairly large areas to get a good idea of the snow distribution in that area. So obviously we have then flown those areas in the summertime already to get the background data and then we fly in the winter to get the elevation data with the snow cover.
For many of these areas, for example, here in South Central we’ve been focusing along the Seward Highway that connects Anchorage to the Kenai Peninsula and is the only road. So it’s a very important road, and it has many, many avalanche paths. And we have flown these snow distribution surveys there for several years. And some years even twice or even three times that same season to get sort of this – an understanding of the seasonal changes in the snowpack as well.
And so yeah, we work closely there with DOT again, regarding the highway. But also we’ve had a close – and still have, a close partnership with Alaska Railroad. So the railroad connects Anchorage down to Kenai Peninsula, but also to Whittier where all the freight ships come in. So very important supplier there. And they sort of co-monitor the avalanche paths. But some sections DOT are in charge of, and some sections Alaska Railroad is in charge of. And so we work with both of those partners to provide snow distribution information, and we also do again, numerical modeling work for them to try to understand how various avalanche scenarios may impact their infrastructure.
And so I’d say our work at DGGS is guided by the existence of some sort of resources or infrastructure or communities. We typically don’t focus too much on areas that are just very remote and where no people or resources are impacted. So – but some areas we do try to cover more just to get that sort of geographical I guess understanding as well.
Austin Madson: Yeah, and that makes sense from kind of what we talked about in the beginning of the podcast, right. The status at large and the classic phrase, does a bear use the restroom in the wood? {Laughs}
Katreen Wilkstrom-Jones: I don’t know if I heard that one before {laughs}.
Austin Madson: Well, there’s – use a different word, but that’s okay. But yeah, so I wanted to talk a little bit more about the kind of repeat snow level measurements. Do you find that with the changes or differences in grain size or wetness of the snow that you have to make any corrections for the snow height measurements in your lidar data?
Katreen Wilkstrom-Jones: Well, I should say that the wetness of the snow definitely affects our ability to collect data. A lot of instruments that we’re using is operating at 1550 nanometer wavelength. And for of you in the audience that are familiar with lidar know that that’s not the optimal wavelength for collecting anything wet. {Laughs} It absorbs very quickly at that wavelength. But it’s an instrument, and it’s a wavelength that has really worked for our diverse applications at the DGGS. But we are hoping to acquire something that’s more specific to working on snow and glaciers in the future.
But nonetheless it works well for us. But we do have to be very cautious about when we fly these surveys. So in March here after equinox up here in Alaska, the snow tends to get very wet quickly in the afternoon solely based on solar inputs. So we have to hit those slopes early in the morning to make sure that the snow is cold. But yeah, also we see those coarse grains for different melt recycles, we have sort of discussed that that can lead to some scattering as well. So yeah, it is a challenging time to survey for sure. Those earlier season surveys tend to be more successful.
Jill Nicolazzo: But you guys have that new ice penetrating radar for this year. Does that help with any of that?
Katreen Wilkstrom-Jones: A little bit different applications. Yeah, so we acquired an ice penetrating radar this spring, and we’re using that instrument to map the floor of the – of glaciers. So that’s mainly to estimate the depths of glaciers. Whereas of course with the lidar instrument we want to rather get the elevations, the surface elevations of the snow. So it’s a little bit different, yeah, little bit different applications there. But together they would provide really powerful data.
Austin Madson: Well, thanks for enlightening us a little bit about kind of snow remote sensing with respect to lidar. So let’s pause for a quick word from our sponsor LAStools.
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Austin Madson: So Katreen, from my understanding you’re technically in this kind of landslide hazards subgroup of which Jill is one of the main components of. But both of you are under this kind of broad umbrella of the geohazards section of the Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys. So how and what kind of necessitates your two different I guess subgroups if we can call them that to work together? I know you all have worked on a couple of different projects, Jill and Katreen. So Jill, maybe do you want to jump in and talk about how these different subgroups kind of work together and what necessitates that need?
Jill Nicolazzo: So prior to the Landslide Hazards Group existing, Katreen helped out with landslides just in general. The group had to borrow from other sections because it just didn’t exist yet. So her experience there has been super helpful to me, especially this last event near Wrangell. I don’t cross over into climate (inaudible), but she definitely wears the landslide hat occasionally.
Katreen Wilkstrom-Jones: Yeah, so Jill belongs to the Landslide Hazards Group, and I belong to the Climate and Cryosphere Hazards Group. So I guess just to clarify a little bit the different scopes of the groups is that in terms of landslides, the Landslide Hazards Group kind of more traditionally looked at mainly rain induced landslides. Whereas the Climate and Cryosphere Hazards Group were more focused on landslides that occur due to changes in the frozen environment. So whether that’s maybe permafrost degradation or glacier retreat or the buttressing of slopes, snow related, snow hydrology related landslides.
But like you alluded to, I mean, we have a ton of overlap. And that’s why we work so closely. So there’s not a super clear way to distinguish the groups. But we do have different focus areas. And the more we see the Landslide Hazards Group grow, I think our group, the Climate and Cryosphere Hazards Group, we will start focusing more on sort of our core topics, which is snow and ice, to put it simply.
Austin Madson: Yeah, thank you for clarifying that. So that said, you all both have worked on this project that in 2023 Jill was the lead author on, where you all were looking at these handful of rainfall induced landslides over near Wrangell, Alaska. Can you all talk a little bit about the main goals of that particular project and what data were used and how it was processed to kind of satisfy those goals?
Jill Nicolazzo: Just luckily we’d happened to collect lidar over the island in July of last year. So when the event happened we had a very recent lidar dataset to compare to. When we first arrived there our main goal was to sort of assess slope stability across – well, Wrangell Island in general. The Department of Transportation of course was focused on the landslide there on Zimovia Highway. So we were sort of looking at everything else that DOT wasn’t kind of looking at.
And the week after, we were able to collect lidar over the two main landslides and then a couple of areas that were known to have debris flow or flooding. So we could do a very almost pre and post event comparison of the lidar datasets. Like we mentioned, Katreen had been at the Haines landslide a couple of years prior. So her experience there applied very well to this one. It was my first emergency event. And (sounds like: Garrett) too, who was a co-author, he’d responded to a low point landslide near Seward a couple of years ago. So their experience and expertise there was much appreciated by me. I did not really know what I was doing but they did. {Laughs}
Katreen Wilkstrom-Jones: Yeah, these emergency responses are very interesting and quite different from what we do on a day-to-day basis in the office or in the field when we had planned field work, right. So yeah, when we get sent to these communities that are affected by disaster like that, there is a lot of public information involved. So what landslides are, why they happen on these particular slopes and so forth. But then of course yeah, collecting lidar has been something that’s been in our wheelhouse for a few years now. So that’s what we focus on right away. But to keep in mind is that these landslides happen during the worst weather conditions. And those are the worst conditions to fly lidar as well. So we were quite hampered by weather for that Wrangell response. And that’s why we couldn’t collect until the following week. And even that week couldn’t collect everything we wanted to either. But we got the main targeted areas at least.
It was interesting to look at the data afterwards because the two collections that we had available to us, the one from the summer prior that covered entire island, and that was for Division of Forestry that wanted that dataset. So it was a co-project together with them, the reason why we collected the whole island. But that wasn’t collected at the same level of detail as we maybe wanted to for making very sort of accurate assessments of volumes for the various slides that occurred everywhere.
So we had – and we are discussing this in the report that we published after this event, is that there were some discrepancies between the two products. A lot of folks that know what I’m talking about there. Getting those two datasets registered well, but then also if they simply were collected with different goals in mind, you might see some differences that are not true differences, right, in actual change. So yeah, there were some challenges there in analyzing the data. But overall I think we got a good idea of volumes from the main landslides at least.
Austin Madson: Yeah, it’s always – sometimes serendipitous when you go to a slide or you need to monitor an event and you have recently acquired data, and you’re all stoked about it because well, you have recently acquired data that you don’t have to worry about. And then when you get into the weeds you realize that oh, well, maybe the point density is really low compared to what we need.
Katreen Wilkstrom-Jones: Exactly. That’s exactly what happened.
Austin Madson: It’s never a perfect data acquisition, huh.
Katreen Wilkstrom-Jones: No, that seems hard, especially in Southeast Alaska. I mean, it’s been – it’s just – the forest is so dense. It takes a lot of effort to get through those, what are they, 150 meter tall trees?
Jill Nicolazzo: Yeah, the trees are spruce – yeah, and devil’s club with its leaves that are a foot and a half across. It covers the floor, yeah. The drainage channels are very steep. During leaf on, it’s tough to get through to the ground.
Katreen Wilkstrom-Jones: Yeah, indeed.
Austin Madson: So this kind of brings up another question that I wanted to talk to you all about. We know – I don’t know from firsthand experience, but Alaska is a really rugged place, right. The weather is rugged. The animals are rugged. The topography, the vegetation, a couple of things that you all have mentioned before. So how do this translate into some of your difficulties in undertaking field work and processing data? Are there logistical issues? I have some friends and colleagues from grad school who had to go through bear and shotgun training in order to do field work in Alaska, working with helicopters. Can you just talk about the ruggedness of doing some of this work?
Jill Nicolazzo: Every year we have required bear safety training and firearms because we’re allowed to take firearms for bear safety into the field with us. We take wilderness first aid, various aviation related trainings. In the end though it kind of comes down to a personal comfort level. I myself have no trouble getting on a steep slope or even setting anchors and roping up. I’m okay with that. But Katreen goes back country on skis and hiking across glaciers, and I don’t know anything about glacier rescue. We each kind of have our own safety sort of comfort levels.
Katreen Wilkstrom-Jones: Yeah, definitely. Yeah, we do get a lot of training every year to stay on top of it. And in terms of planning logistics for these surveys, it’s quite challenging. They’re always opportunistic, right. So we might identify a two week span where we’d like to get it done. But when it comes down to it it’s almost decision making the day prior.
Jill Nicolazzo: Can the helicopter fly today?
Katreen Wilkstrom-Jones: Yeah, exactly. We had a large survey being done a couple of years ago in the fall outside of (inaudible) Chugach Mountains, so southeast of Anchorage in a 20 mile drainage. And it was a really large area. We had to get it done before a certain timeline or deadline sorry. We had to just be on standby basically every week and weekend to fly. And it was a lot of hopping around. Half days there, half days there. It took us I think ten days total to get it done because of all the hopping around. It was fall, a lot of storms. So it was very challenging. But luckily I live myself in Girdwood, so I was right there and could just go out the same day and get it done. So that was great (inaudible) so close to the study area.
But that’s oftentimes not the case and sometimes we simply can’t do it and just have to communicate that to our funders and push it to the next season. That’s just what it is.
Jill Nicolazzo: And communication in the field can be challenging too because there’s so much of the state doesn’t have cell coverage. So we’re trying to message with (sounds like: in reaches) that sometimes go through in a few minutes, sometimes an hour. We have satellite phones too of course. But sometimes just telling our boss, oh, this thing has changed, can be a challenge.
Austin Madson: Right, but at what point is the challenge less fun than you’re getting out of it? Maybe working with some of these logistics could be rewarding, right, and overcoming those challenges. But at some point it must be overbearing.
Jill Nicolazzo: I think whenever you encounter a situation where it feels unsafe and I’m thinking specifically in terms of flying helicopters. You might not feel so excited some days about flying that helicopter when cloud ceiling is low or you’re landing someplace where clouds come in and out. And you might be completely in the clouds for a minute, and that’s a bit stressful. We know helicopter accidents happen, and luckily we work with really good vendors and great pilots. But yeah, I’d say that’s situations when it’s not fun, is when you feel like something that could happen. {Laughs} Sometimes you do legitimately get weathered in and your helicopter can’t come get you for a day or two.
Katreen Wilkstrom-Jones: Yeah, that has happened. Not to us too, but over staff, yeah, division, it has happened. We’ve had numerous bear encounters as well. Again, none of us have had really close ones. But coworkers have had to shoot bears that were attacking them in the field. So situations do happen.
Austin Madson: Well, thanks for kind of enlightening us at to the intricacies and complications of working in the great state of Alaska. It’s really eye opening I think for a lot of us here. Let’s switch gears a touch and can we talk a little bit about what remote sensing payloads the Department of Natural Resources has or that DGGS has at you all’s disposal? Also can you touch on how the planning and acquisition of these remote sensing products goes? Are you working with contractors to help plan these data acquisitions? Or how does that work?
Katreen Wilkstrom-Jones: Yeah, sure I guess I can touch on that a little bit. I can’t really speak for other divisions under the Department of Natural Resources. I know that, for example, Mainland Water, I think they have some drones nowadays. Department of Transportation certainly have drones now. But yeah, DGGS, we have had a lidar instrument that we’ve operated in house since 2018. So we have a RIEGL (sounds like: Brooks 1L4). So non-ranger there with the setup, the IMU setup designed by Phoenix Lidar.
And like I mentioned earlier, it’s operating in a 1550 millimeter wavelength. It’s a powerful sensor that we have been able to use for various applications. We prefer to have it installed on a fixed wing aircraft, and we also use helicopter platforms. We have mounts for both the Bell Jet Ranger helicopter and also the R44. And we’re hoping to maybe acquire a mount for an A-Star as well, as those aircraft are really common in the southeast and a bit powerful to work in.
We do also have photogrammetry equipment. So we can do (sounds like: structure promotion), photogrammetry surveys from aircraft as well. And our coworkers in the coastal has this group, they have photogrammetry setups for drones also. And we also do have a Wingtra fixed wing drone with camera set up in our Climate and Cryosphere Hazards Group. So we do both lidar photogrammetry, but recently it’s been a lot of lidar. It’s usually quite attractive to get that data. And of course in the future we’re hoping to have a couple set up with both camera and lidar and maybe a thermal and hyper spectral would be cool as well. So we have a long wish list actually.
I want to be clear that we are certainly not competing with other vendors. So we are – when we do surveys it’s always a sort of joint project that we’re working on. So, for example, the Wrangell survey last summer was together with Forestry. They had a research interest in collecting data there. We did as well. And we had the instruments. We provided the data there. Same with DOT and Alaska Railroad. It’s us acquiring data in a location where we have research interests and they do as well. So for some other products that they might be interested in they may contract a private vendor instead.
So we’re certainly not competing there with them. And we typically do pretty small areas as well compared to let’s say NV5 Geospatial. They do really large surveys. (sounds like: RU) Spatial office is in charge and kind of coordinating those large collections over state of Alaska. So they work with all the vendors, but also incorporating our data into a database that basically lists all the data that is available and the status with different collections and so forth. So we’re definitely taking large steps to getting more really good data in Alaska. A lot has happened over the past five years.
Jill Nicolazzo: Yeah, that’s what I was going to add, was that the geospatial office can contract out much larger areas. I’m not sure exactly what their goal is, but they’re trying to cover the whole state. It’s going to take a little while, but…
{Crosstalk}
– large areas each summer and take advantage of that (inaudible).
Katreen Wilkstrom-Jones: Yeah, absolutely.
Austin Madson: Okay, well, thanks for filling us in on all the equipment and your wish list too. So I hope your wishes come true of course. But let’s wrap up. I want to have you all talk a little bit about what you enjoy most about your jobs. You all have talked about a lot of different kinds of projects and how you’re wearing multiple hats. You’re crossing over to different subgroups. You’re doing some public facing outreach. You’re into the weeds doing technical data processing and writing technical reports. What do you both enjoy the most about your jobs? Is it the data? Is it the fact that you’re out in this beautiful landscape that is sometimes really rugged? Is it the applied nature of the projects? What is it that you like?
Jill Nicolazzo: Well, gosh, when the sun’s shining and it’s warm out, yeah, the field work is great. When it’s raining and the bugs are biting, not quite so much. Even though I’m mostly working with landslides there’s a lot of variety even within that topic. So each project is a little different even if they appear the same on the surface. There’s differences and, like, the artistic side of a lidar interpretation, it’s a puzzle. Like, what am I actually seeing in this gray smear across my screen?
Katreen Wilkstrom-Jones: Well it’s kind of a love/hate thing. But I like the puzzle. I like unraveling it. it’s definitely detective work.
Jill Nicolazzo: Detective work, yeah.
Katreen Wilkstrom-Jones: I think for me it’s really the variety of tasks that’s really appealing. I mean, only just looking at the lidar collection side of things, just really exciting to be able to participate in all steps of applying the logistics, operating lidar, collecting the data. Collecting the ground control data, all of that. Processing the data afterwards and analyzing it and then putting together the product. Whether it’s the data files or the actual analytical reports. It’s just really exciting to be part of all steps.
And I think combination of in depth data processing and all of that, but then being able to be out and working with communities hands on and providing this information that’s really critical to them and their safety in the end. But also of course all the field work is really exciting. In our group we do – apart from a lot of remote sensing work, we also do a lot of in situ missions and weather station maintenance work. And we do also have a running (sounds like: citizen) science project that we work on called (Inaudible) Observations. So it’s just a lot of different things that we are involved with. And I think that’s – for me at least that’s what makes it really exciting. It never gets boring. It’s always new things coming up.
Jill Nicolazzo: And I think having a product in the end that either we’re using ourselves or we know somebody else is going to use makes it feel really useful.
Katreen Wilkstrom-Jones: Yes. Got a satisfying feel to it. Yeah, (inaudible) communities are screaming for more data, for early warning systems installed for all these various hazards. You know the work you’re doing will always be used by someone. So I think that’s really rewarding.
Austin Madson: Well, thank you again Jill and Katreen. I know that residents of the state of Alaska will also thank you for your hard work and keeping everyone safe up there. So thanks for taking the time out of your notoriously busy field season here and speaking with the LIDAR Magazine Podcast. We really appreciate it. Thank you.
Jill Nicolazzo: Thank you Austin.
Katreen Wilkstrom-Jones: Yeah, thanks so much for having us.
Austin Madson: Of course. Yeah, so that’s all we have for this episode. Again, I want to thank Katreen and Jill for chatting with us today, and thanks everybody for tuning in. I hope you all were able to learn something new. If you haven’t already, make sure to subscribe to receive episodes automatically via our website or Spotify or Apple podcasts or wherever you get your pods from. Stay tuned for other exciting podcast episodes in the coming weeks and take care out there.
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This edition of the LIDAR Magazine Podcast is brought to you by rapidlasso. Our flagship product, the LAStools software suite is a collection of highly efficient, multicore command line tools to classify, tile, convert, filter, raster, triangulate, contour, clip, and polygonize lidar data. Visit rapidlasso.de for details.
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