I worked on a project on lava flows in Hawaii with Dr. Christopher Hamilton. One of the goals was to study and understand the morphology of the December 1974 flow from Kilauea. A couple years prior, I had started a hobby of kite aerial photography (KAP). Because of the uncertainty around flying unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in sensitive places, I was able to leverage my new hobby as a skill to collect over 10,000 kite aerial images of our study site. I used a computer vision technique called multiview stereophotogrammetry to build a digital terrain model at cm-scale spatial resolution for our research team. Read more in the excellent press release written by Daniel Stolte at University of Arizona.

UA Scientists Fly Kites in Hawaii to Study Mars

An outflow channel of the December 1974 lava flow on the big island of Hawaii.