NEXUS – Earth System Dynamics at the University of Potsdam

The terrestrial Earth Surface System (ESS) is driven by geological, biological, and climatic forces. They form a complex system of closely coupled processes and feedbacks that are not yet sufficiently understood. Knowledge of these interactions is essential because the Earth’s surface is the foundation for all human activity and its dynamics impact all facets of life, habitability, and sustainability.

Through the U Potsdam’s research initiative NEXUS: Earth Surface Dynamics the renowned earth, environmental, life and data sciences of the Potsdam-Berlin area will intensify existing collaboration and liaise with new partners to form a network to understand Earth-Surface processes. U Potsdam’s science campus Golm will be the center of NEXUS providing modern infrastructure and a concentration of interdisciplinary expertise. Source: S. Schneider, U Potsdam.

Lake-Balance Modeling Using MATLAB

In a number of publications, we used a simple energy-based lake balance model to estimate precipitation and evaporation during highstands of paleolakes in Argentina and Kenya. The highstands were reconstructed from radiocarbon-dated paleoshorelines of landslide-dammed lakes and closed-basin rift lakes. Here we publish the MATLAB code to estimate the evaporation over land surface and water surface, which is the core of the lake-balance model used in our research. Continue reading “Lake-Balance Modeling Using MATLAB”

Calculating the NDVI From Multispectral Camera Images Using MATLAB, Part 2

In an earlier post in March 2017 I explained how to capture NDVI Red+NIR images using a MAPIR Survey2 NDVI, to import the images into MATLAB and to calculate the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index. Here is the result of the experiment repeated in June 2017 during the growing season. Continue reading “Calculating the NDVI From Multispectral Camera Images Using MATLAB, Part 2”