I focus on the analysis of satellite imagery to better understand the terrestrial earth environment and the impacts of a rapidly changing climate. I have been working for SSAI in the Biospheric Sciences Lab of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center since 1998, on a variety of projects centered around: mapping landcover/landuse change; building imagery processing systems; and conducting field research to support remotely sensed analyses. Specific projects include: measuring global vegetation trends; characterizing local and regional deforestation; tracking glacier recession; generating and analyzing change in elevation models; monitoring monarch butterfly habitat and its microclimatic characteristics; creating a near real-time global flood mapping system; and building ArcGIS web services.Most recently, I have been leading a Land-Cover / Land-Use Change project in the Bolivian Andes, examining the impact of climate change on high altitude peatlands that are critical to local livelihoods. This project has multiple interdisciplinary components: mapping of glacier and peatland landcover change; monitoring of peatland hydrology and meteorology to understand the hydrological drivers and dynamics; botanical studies to understand the unique vegetation; and climate modeling studies to understand likely future climate scenarios.For another project, I built a near real-time global flood mapping system, which generates and publishes daily global maps of current flooding (albeit limited by the optical nature of the input data) from the continuous data stream of the two MODIS sensors. These products are used by disaster response agencies, and by others to better understand the past 20 years of flood history.In the South Pacific, I've been building and analyzing elevation models from high-resolution stereo imagery to track and model the geomorphic evolution of a Tongan volcanic island that erupted in 2015.I enjoy the challenges of extracting rigorous and useful information from satellite imagery, although this can be a constantly moving target as data volumes increase with new sensors, as the historical archive accumulates, and as new computing approaches (big data, machine learning) and resources (Google Earth Engine, etc) become available.
Listed skills include Arcgis, Gis, Research, Data Analysis, and 24 others.
