Poll

Land registry contributes to developing a country


Spacer
News
News > Researcher Recognized for Improving Climate Data

Researcher Recognized for Improving Climate Data

  29/12/2009
A NASA-led team has been recognised with a prestigious award for helping scientists better understand our home planet. NASA and the U.S. Department of the Interior presented the William T. Pecora Award to the Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System, or CERES, team and to Forrest Hall, senior research scientist at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.

Researcher Recognised for remote sensing discovery

The two agencies present individual and group Pecora Awards to honor outstanding contributions in the field of remote sensing and its application to understanding Earth. The award was established in 1974 to honor the memory of William T. Pecora, former director of the U.S. Geological Survey and under secretary of the Department of the Interior.

 

This year's award was presented 17th December in San Francisco during the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union. The presentation was made by Marcia McNutt, director of the U.S. Geological Survey, and Michael Freilich, director of NASA's Earth Science Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. Norman Loeb and Bruce Wielicki of NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., accepted the award on behalf of the CERES team.

Led from Langley, the CERES team has compiled a critical data set for monitoring and predicting climate change. The data set, which comes from five instruments on three spacecraft, is being used to improve our understanding of the natural and human-induced changes in the climate through accurate measurements of the Earth's radiative energy balance. This balance is the amount of energy Earth receives from the sun and keeps in the atmosphere or radiates back into space. Along with measurements of oceans, land, snow, ice, clouds, aerosols and meteorology, CERES data products provide a scientific basis for developing global environmental policies.

 

The CERES instruments provide highly accurate measurements of the radiative energy balance at multiple layers in the atmosphere. In addition, the CERES team developed a rapid-response product that provides a measure of the amount of solar energy at Earth's surface. These data are used by agricultural resource managers to gauge soil moisture and by engineers monitoring and designing solar power applications.

Forrest Hall has been instrumental in advancing remote sensing of Earth since the inception of the Earth Resources Technology Satellite (now known as the Landsat program) that NASA launched in 1972. Hall developed technologies for the remote sensing of vegetation, provided high-quality global data sets to the community and contributed to the science on which remote sensing was founded -- both through his leadership of major field programs and his own research.

Hall's research contributed to solving a number of crucial problems in remote-sensing science concerned with interpreting images gathered over vegetated areas. He was involved from the very start of land surface remote sensing while working at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston on large-scale agricultural assessments. These pioneering efforts by NASA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture involved some of the earliest work in comparing surface, airborne and satellite data.

Hall also led the Boreal Ecosystem-Atmosphere Study, or BOREAS, which resulted in a major advance in our understanding of the role of the far northern boreal forests in climate change. Hall's efforts in this study led to a better understanding of North America's carbon, water and energy cycles.



Bookmark and Share

Read more about:  satellite  remote sensing 
Supplier: NASA

More news from this supplier:
NASA and NOAA's GOES-P Satellite Successfully Launched
NASA Survey Reveals Arctic Ice Thinning
Most Complete Topographic Map of Earth
GOES-O Satellite Successfully Launched
Arctic Literally on Thin Ice
Virtual Exploration of Mars
NASA and USAID Bring Earth-Observation Benefits to Africa
Mars Phoenix Lander Finishes Work on Red Planet


High-precision Measuring Stations
GeoIQ to Distribute Definiens
North Country Surveyors Warm-up to RTK
Interactive Maps with BroadbandStat
Snowdonian Mountain Resurvey Could Rewrite Map
First ALTM Pegasus for Blom CGR
Garmin Licenses 3D Terrain Models
GAF 25th Anniversary
China Fully Covered
Lockheed Martin to Build GeoEye-2


     


Comments (1):

Good Morning!!! Your website is one of the most excellent informational websites of its kind. I take advantage of reading it. Also you can find some articles at http://www.remotesensingworld.com. remote sensing - 05/01/2010 - 22:22


Make your comment:
Name:
Your comment:
Type over the 2 words (or number) from the picture
 
Most Popular articles Most Popular News Most Popular Jobs
Spacer
Spacer
Spacer
 

Interactive


Geotop Italy Works with IP-S2 System

This movie shows how mapping and sureying with normal traffic speed takes place with Topcon's IP-S2, filmed by Geotop in Italy. In between, also the software and ways to use the application are shown.

 

 Last 5 items:
 Geotop Italy Works with IP-S2 System
 Day in a Life of a Land Surveyor
 Port-au-Prince as Seen from Sky
 Fly-through 3D-Scan Fort Totten Chapel
 How to become a Surveyor
 
Spacer
Spacer
Spacer
Spacer
Spacer
Spacer