On July 23, 2022, NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Landsat program, which acquires satellite images of all of Earth's land areas. On July 26, 2022, Senator Benjamin Cardin (D-MD) and fellow co-sponsors in the Maryland Senate introduced S. Res. 721: "A resolution celebrating the 50th anniversary of the inaugural launch of the Landsat series of Earth Observation satellites, a joint mission of the United States Geological Survey and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration." (Note: Senate resolutions are not binding law; rather, they express the collective sentiment of the Senate on a particular issue, person, or event.)

Glaciologist and UMBC researcher Christopher Shuman (NASA Code 615/UMBC) is one of many scientists who utilizes Landsat data and informs others of the discoveries from Landsat; he also contributes to outreach events and stories related to or derived from Landsat data.

From the August 1st edition of the National Snow & Ice Data Center's (NSIDC) Greenland Ice Sheet Today, "Heat Ripple", researchers discussed different aspects of the 2022 melt surge in Greenland. Dr. Shuman contributed to the discussion of the heat ripple, specifically the "excessive melt event across northern Greenland." His contributed image details NOAA Observatory's "preliminary air temperature, dew point, and air pressure reading from Summit, Greenland from July 21 - July 24, 2022," as "the melt runoff reached 10 billion tons per day on July 22." (Based on the Greenland Today article and the examination of available Landsat 8 and 9 scenes, Dr. Shuman also could support a recent Earth Observatory story regarding late July conditions over Svalbard, Norway's far north, ice-capped archipelago.) Additionally, Dr. Shuman recently gave a talk titled "Earth's Ice: Changing Now; 50 Years Of Landsat" to a group organized by the NASA Glenn Research Center's Office of STEM Engagement for the MUREP Precollege Summer Institute's (PSI) Career Connection on Climate Change.

Last September, Dr. Shuman and Valerie Casasanto (610/UMBC), ICESat-2 Mission Outreach Lead, supported outreach activities at the Landsat 9 launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Landsat is the longest civilian Earth Observation Program, with data freely available to the public, anywhere in the world. Peruse NASA's Landsat 9: Continuing 50 Years of Eyes on our Changing Planet for more information on the Landsat 9 satellite, and check out the article "A Planetary Sage: Landsat at 50" by Laura Rocchio to appreciate the vast abundance of all that the Landsat program has provided and will continue to contribute to our understanding of our planet. (You can also follow the latest news about and from Landsat on Twitter.)

According to Dr. Shuman, "A special aspect of the Landsat 9 launch was being able to meet Virginia (Ginger) Norwood who led the team that developed and flew the 'experimental' Multispectral Scanner (MSS) on the first Landsat among other notable career achievements. The MSS exceeded expectations and became the primary sensor and basis for digital Earth remote sensing on all subsequent Landsat platforms." In November 2021, Virginia Norwood was awarded the USGS John Wesley Powell Award for her contributions to USGS. Further, she inspired the Ladies of Landsat, "scientists, entrepreneurs, leaders, mothers, authors, and Landsat fans," who held a post-launch event in Lompoc, CA.  Become a Landsat fan and check in with Landsat Science to see what's going on in your world, all over the planet.

Join us for a virtual seminar by Dr. David Stensrud, Department of Meteorology and Atmospheric Science, The Pennsylvania State University. His talk is titled "Using WSR-88D Radar Observations to Observe and Understand the Convective Boundary Layer."

Date and Time: Thursday, August 11, 2022 at 11:00am

Join us via Teams.

While the National Weather Service's network of WSR-88D radars were primarily developed and deployed to observe precipitating systems and their hazards, and to estimate rainfall amounts, the radars also can detect scatterers in the convective boundary layer.  These radars were further enhanced with an upgrade to dual-polarization in 2013. Using operational WSR-88D data sets over the past 5 years, faculty and students at Penn State have used radar observations to develop a 10-year climatology of horizontal convective rolls and cellular convection over central Oklahoma, including the identification of wide rolls over land, and to develop a method to estimate convective boundary layer depth using differential reflectivity observations.  Results from these studies and our current research projects will be summarized to highlight the capability of these radars to study the convective boundary layer.

David J. Stensrud is Professor and Head of the Department of Meteorology and Atmospheric Science at The Pennsylvania State University. Dr. Stensrud's research has focused on short-range ensemble forecasting and data assimilation, severe weather, convective-scale predictability, the North American monsoon, and radar observations of the convective boundary layer. For 27 years prior to his transition to Penn State, Dr. Stensrud was a Research Meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma. He received his B.S. in Mathematics and Meteorology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Meteorology from The Pennsylvania State University. He is a recipient of the White House Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the American Meteorological Society's Clarence Leroy Meisinger and Charles Franklin Brooks awards, the NOAA Distinguished Career Award, and is a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society. Dr. Stensrud has authored over 150 formal peer-reviewed publications and the book Parameterization Schemes: Keys to Understanding Numerical Weather Prediction Models.

For more information on the GESTAR II Seminar Series, click here.

Congratulations to Inia Soto Ramos (616/MSU) for receiving two 2022 Hydrosphere, Biosphere, and Geophysics (HBG) Annual Peer Awards, both in the category Scientific/Technical Support: one Peer Award and one Team Award.

Inia Soto Ramos, HBG Peer Award: "Superb support of SeaBASS, EXPORTS, and the Ocean Ecology Laboratory."

From her nomination: "Dr. Inia Soto Ramos deserves special recognition for her excellence and dedication to the OB DAAC and Ocean Ecology Lab. In particular, she has performed superb data management for the EXPORTS project and NASA's SeaBASS oceanographic data archive. She has worked tirelessly to synthesize and archive a multitude of important and challenging datasets from the EXPORTS's North Atlantic campaign, and to bring in new, highly complex ones in preparation for PACE. ... ."

OB.DAAC: NASA's Ocean Biology Distributed Active Archive Center

EXPORTS: EXport Processes in the Ocean from Remote Sensing

SeaBASS:  SeaWiFS Bio-optical Archive and Storage System

From the team's nomination: The SeaWiFS Bio-optical Archive and Storage System (SeaBASS) is a key component of the services performed by the Ocean Biology Processing Group (OBPG) in the OEL, Code 616. ... Recently, significant improvements to SeaBASS have been completed. The underlying infrastructure has been modernized by integrating SeaBASS with the Ocean Data Processing System (ODPS). This has the added benefit of unifying SeaBASS data ordering and distribution with ODPS. ... A new capability, Visual SeaBASS, has been substantially completed. Visual SeaBASS is the in-water apparently optical properties (AOP) processor needed to produce validation data for AOP products ... . Finally, the data submission protocols and documentation requirements were revamped to aid users in providing complete data sets to the archive. By these developments, the team continues to maintain SeaBASS as the premier archive and distribution center for ocean in situ data."

The original article can be found here: Yuan, T., H. Song, R. Wood, C. Wang, L. Oreopoulos, S. Platnick, S. Von Hippel, K. Meyer, S. Light, and E. Wilcox (2022), Global reduction in ship-tracks from sulfur regulations for shipping fuel, Science Advances, 8(29), https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abn7988.

According to the DOE's announcement, "Projects were chosen by competitive merit review under the DOE Funding Opportunity Announcement, "Research Development and Partnership Pilot (RDPP)," sponsored by the Biological and Environmental Research (BER) program within the Department's Office of Science."

For background on LASSO, or Large-Eddy Simulation (LES) ARM Symbiotic Simulation and Observation, and its role in the proposed study, Dr. Barbosa explains that, "To bridge the gap between observations and models, the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) program of the Department of Energy (DoE) has recently developed LASSO (...). LASSO bundles LES model outputs with ARM observations of real clouds, providing a powerful tool to understand cloud processes in the atmosphere."

Further, this RDPP project aims to foster collaborations with national science labs and minority-serving institutions (MSIs). According to Dr. Barbosa, "... the first objective of this project is to develop a new partnership among the proposing institutions, allowing the team to share expertise and collaborate on topics which they have been pursuing independently. We then want to establish a collaboration with the LASSO team at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) to achieve our second objective, which is to participate in outreach and training activities offered by the Earth and Environmental Systems Sciences Division (EESSD), such as the LASSO Tutorial in May 2021. Pursuing these two objectives will enable our team to engage in EESSD relevant research using ARM data and models. This will lead to the fulfillment of our third objective, which is to foster atmospheric science research and training capacity at our minority-serving institutions."

For more information on this grant and related activities, contact Dr. Barbosa at hbarbosa@umbc.edu.

Andy Sayer (616/UMBC) was a co-author on a paper and related presentations given at the GSFC's AI Center of Excellence (AICoE) seminar series. According to Dr. Sayer, "The AICoE is a cross-disciplinary umbrella hosting monthly seminars on diverse topics; featuring new collaboration and funding opportunities; advanced computational resources and technology; examples of AI applied to specific science problems; innovative methods for AI, ML, and deep learning for scientific discovery; and helpful co-learning workshops."

Further, "The paper outlines and demonstrates new methods to observed atmospheric and ocean properties from space. It enhances NASA's heritage approach in two main ways: (1) using a powerful statistical methodology called Optimal Estimation to provide uncertainty estimates and quality metrics on each retrieved quantity, and (2) using machine learning to speed up calculations and make the method more computationally practical for large-scale satellite data processing."  The paper is led by Amir Ibrahim, a civil servant in the Ocean Ecology Laboratory (Code 616).

Ibrahim, A. (616/GSFC), B. Franz (616/GSFC), A. Sayer (616/UMBC), K. Knobelspiesse (616/GSFC), M. Zhang (616/SAIC), S. Bailey (616/GSFC), L. I. W. McKinna (Go2Q Pty, Ltd.), M. Gao (616/SSAI), and P. J. Werdell (616/GSFC) (2022), Optimal estimation framework for ocean color atmospheric correction and pixel-level uncertainty quantification, Appl. Opt., 61(22), 6453-6475, https://doi.org/10.1364/AO.461861.

Young-Kwon Lim of the GMAO at NASA GSFC also was a third-author of a recent publication:

Jeong, Y.-C. (Hanyang Univ.), S.-Y. Yeh (Hanyang Univ.), Y.-K. Lim (610.1/UMBC), A. Santoso (CSHOR), and G. Wang (CSHOR) (2022), Indian Ocean warming as key driver of long-term positive trend of Arctic Oscillation, NPJ (Nature Partner Journal) Clim. Atmos. Sci., 5(56), https://doi.org/10.1038/s41612-022-00279-x. 

Ghassan Taha, a GESTAR II Senior Research Scientist affiliated with Morgan State University, works in the NASA GSFC Atmospheric Chemistry and Dynamics Department. Dr. Taha (614/MSU) is the PI of the Ozone Mapping and Profiler Suite (OMPS) Limb Profiler (LP) aerosol products study, along with his science team, Co-Is Robert Loughman (Hampton Univ.) and Peter Colarco (614/GSFC). In May, they released a new and improved aerosol product, the version 2.1 Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (SNPP) OMPS aerosol extinction profiles product, which was publicly released at GES DISC:

At the 3rd International Workshop on Stratospheric Sulfur and Role in Climate (SSiRC) at Leeds University, Leeds, UK, Dr. Taha was an invited keynote speaker and presented the talk "Tracking the January 2022 Hunga-Tonga aerosol cloud using space-based observations."  He also co-authored several presentations; for more, visit https://eu.eventscloud.com/ehome/200197691/. Dr. Taha explained that for his team's research on the Hunga-Tonga cloud, "The OMPS LP was one of a few instruments to provide global and vertical distribution of the volcanic cloud daily, and [he] was interviewed a few times to comment on this event. [They] also modified the aerosol product to increase its vertical altitude and managed to follow the volcanic cloud above a 40-km altitude, which is unprecedented for a volcanic eruption. The data also was publicly released at https://avdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/pub/data/satellite/Suomi_NPP/L2/LP-L2-AER-45km/. To summarize [their] efforts regarding the Hunga-Tonga eruption, [they produced data] and provided a scientific analysis." At present, a related paper led by Dr. Taha is currently under review. In February 2022, Dr. Taha contributed to an Earth Observatory Item of the Day related to the Hunga-Tonga Volcano Plume, and can be found here.

Join us for a virtual seminar by Dr. Jun Wang, James E. Ashton Professor, College of Engineering; Interim Chair, Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering; and, Assistant Director, Iowa Technology Institute, University of Iowa. His talk is titled "NightHawk: A satellite mission concept for low light imaging of fires, aerosols, and beyond."

Date and Time: Tuesday, July 26, 2022 at 2:00pm

Join us via Teams. 

In this talk, Dr. Wang will provide a brief overview of fire detection from space and articulate the need of a satellite mission for low light imaging to renew the legacy of first fire detection from space made by using visible light in the early 1970s. NightHawk is a satellite mission concept that is currently in formulation. If successful, it will shed light on fire characteristics, smoke transport, urban air quality, and light pollution, all at night. It will measure nighttime light from fires, cities, and the moon at multiple wavelengths. Its data can be used to derive fire combustion efficiency and fire phase, locate fire lines, and retrieve aerosol optical depth and properties. They also can be used for disaster management and the study of urban development and environmental justice. Ultimately, NightHawk will serve as a pathfinder for researchers to quantitatively obtain aerosol, cloud, and surface information at night in a similar manner as they are getting at daytime from existing satellites.

Dr. Jun Wang is a James E. Ashton Professor at the College of Engineering, Interim Chair for the Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering, and Assistant Director of the Iowa Technology Institute at the University of Iowa. His research focuses on the integration of satellite remote sensing and chemistry transport models to study air quality, wildfires, aerosol-cloud interaction, and land-air interaction. He has authored 170+ research articles (H-index 52), co-edited two books, served as a science team member for 10 satellite missions (including the inaugural team for TEMPO and MAIA) and the NASA's senior review panel for Earth science (twice). He conducted his Ph.D. work in atmospheric sciences at the University of Alabama-Huntsville in 2005 under the support of NASA's Earth system science graduate fellowship and his postdoctoral work at Harvard University with the support of NOAA Climate and Global Change postdoctoral fellowship in 2005-2007. He was a recipient of NASA's New Investigator Program award in 2009. More about his research team can be found at https://arroma.uiowa.edu.

For more information on the GESTAR II Seminar Series, click here.