Application of remote sensing in Transportation had been in the areas of environment assessment, infrastructure management, traffic flows and disaster assessment. This paper presents an application of remote sensing data for estimating agricultural freight generation and modeling grain movement from field to elevators and to final destinations.

CFS does not provide information on grain movement from fields to elevators and other available sources provide information of crop production only up to county level. This application gave efficient and quicker means of developing crop production data at sub county level for transportation planning. The satellite imagery of crop layer produced by NASS and USDA is spatially analyzed to develop a database of individual crop coverage for all 71529 one square mile Public Land Survey System's (PLSS) Section polygons of the State of North Dakota. For this present application, i.e. statewide freight modeling the one square mile Section data is aggregated to the Transportation Analysis Zone (TAZ) level to estimate the Trip generation data. The annual published report of NASS which gives the county level crop production data is used for calibration and validation of the estimated crop production data.

This application is a part of statewide freight modeling of North Dakota. The project also involved development of an integrated GIS Network of the state along with freight transshipment locations to model the freight flow.