From satellites gathering imagery from hundreds of miles above the Earth's surface to aerial systems mounted with lasers capable of generating 3D maps with centimeter accuracy, we're gathering more data about our Earth from above than ever before. This course will help you make sense of these complex and exciting datasets. Whether your interest is in natural disasters, environmental assessment, or national security, we'll give you the tools, methods, and techniques to extract actionable and meaningful information from these data. This course will help you understand that an image is more than just a pretty picture.

Are you interested in Solar Energy? Solar Resource Assessment and Economics explores the methods, economic criteria, and meteorological background for assessing the solar resource with respect to project development of solar energy conversion systems for stakeholders in a given locale. It provides students with an in-depth exploration of the physical qualities of the solar resource, estimation of the fractional contributions of irradiance to total demand, and economic assessment of the solar resource. The course utilizes real data sets and resources to provide students context for the drivers, frameworks, and requirements of solar energy evaluation.

A spatial database is the backbone of a successful organization or website that depends upon maintaining and using data pertinent to locations on Earth. In GEOG 868, Spatial Database Management, capabilities specific to Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are combined to teach students to create, maintain, and query spatial databases in both desktop and enterprise environments. Learn the basics of Standard Query Language (SQL) and database design/normalization, the specifics of managing spatial data in an open-source technologies context (Postgres/PostGIS) and in the context of the Esri geodatabase. Along the way, you will become familiar with spatial functions and versioning, the latter in a server environment hosted by Amazon Web Services.

Are you prepared to find strategic opportunities for sustainability-driven innovation within your business or organization? This engaging course will prepare you to do just that. BA 850 will give you the tools and practical experience needed to discern consumer and organizational needs related to sustainability, to create unique offerings to meet sustainability needs, and to develop innovative processes necessary to test and refine sustainable solutions.

The primary goal of this course is to provide a toolset for characterizing and strategizing how nonmarket forces can shape current and future renewable energy markets. The course approaches the exploration and explanation of key concepts in renewable energy and sustainability nonmarket strategies through evidence-based examples. Main topics for the course include: a sociological approach to markets, renewable energy markets, nonmarket conditions, complex systems analysis, and renewable energy technology and business environments. Because renewable energy costs are higher than fossil fuel cost per unit of energy, the main arguments in support of renewable energy, thus far, are functionally nonmarket in character, i.e., environmental (e.g., climate change), political (e.g., energy independence), and/ or social (e.g., good stewardship).

EME 807 overviews a wide range of contemporary technologies in the context of sustainability and examines metrics for their assessment. The course explores the main principles that guide modern science and technology towards sustainable solutions. It covers such topics as resource management technologies, waste and wastewater treatment, renewable energy technologies, high performance buildings and transportation systems, application of informatics and feedback to sustainable systems, and more. Learning in EME 807 heavily relies on real-life examples and taps into current practices of technology analysis. This course goes beyond understanding the background, fostering critical thinking and challenging the students to draw connections between social, environmental, and economic aspects of sustainable technologies.

Unmanned Aerial Systems, or drones, are developing aggressively, and many government and non-government agencies are considering acquiring such systems. This course will focus on the geo-spatial utilization of a UAS. It will cultivate students' knowledge of the capabilities and limitations of the UAS and data post-processing systems. It introduces fundamental concepts surrounding operating a UAS such as strategies for selecting the right UAS, assessing its performance, managing resulting products (i.e. imagery), selecting the appropriate commercially available processing software, assessing product accuracy, figuring ways and means of producing metric products from UAS, and understanding rules and regulations governing operating a UAS in the United States.

EME 812 explores the main physical principles of core solar energy conversion systems, including direct power conversion photovoltaics, concentrating photovoltaics (CPV), and thermal conversion to electricity via concentrating solar power strategies (CSP). It also covers the fundamentals of enabling technologies such as light concentration, solar tracking, power conversion cycles, power conditioning and distribution. Learning in EME 812 relies on analysis of design and performance of existing solar plants that have been deployed in areas such as the southwestern USA, Spain, and North Africa.

Solar thermal energy is a vast renewable energy resource that has been harvested by human civilizations for centuries. Now as energy conversion technologies quickly develop, we look at solar thermal energy as a significant contributor to the future world's energy profile. Solar heat, when properly collected and stored, can provide cost-effective benefits to a wide array of industrial and residential applications. In EME 811, Solar Thermal Energy for Utilities and Industry, we talk about both the main principles of solar thermal energy conversion and some implementation scenarios, such as utilization of solar heat in buildings, solar cooling, solar desalination, solar drying, and chemical processing.

We refer to Earth as the \Blue Planet\" because of its abundance of liquid water; indeed, NASA's search for life on other planets starts with the search for water. While its importance for sustaining life is perhaps common knowledge, the extent to which we depend on water in every aspect of our everyday lives and activities is less obvious. Looking into the coming decades, the global need to decrease water stress and increase water quality is inescapable. In this course, you will explore water's impact on human society from investigating your own personal water usage to developing a water portfolio to addressing global water needs as human population centers and industrial development continue to grow."