Every year, a group of scientists affiliated with the Global Carbon Project give Earth something like an annual checkup. Among the key questions they address: how much carbon is stored in the atmosphere, the ocean, and the land? And how much of that carbon has moved from one reservoir to another through fossil fuel burning, deforestation, reforestation, and uptake by the ocean each year?
Jeffrey Masek (618) discussed satellite technologies and the Landsat Program on the PBS podcast “NovaNow.” The episode is titled “How the future of satellites might affect life on Earth” and also features Dr. Danielle Wood (MIT), who was formerly of NASA Goddard.
Vector-borne disease (VBD) team, A. Anyamba (618/USRA) B. Bishnoi (618/USRA), H. Tubbs (618/USRA), R. Damoah (618/MSU), and J. Small (618/USRA), have released a new version of the Global Chikungunya Risk Mapping and Forecasting Application (CHIKRisk App). The application supports Department of Defense global disease surveillance efforts for force health protection and Pan-American Health Organization's public health early warning.
Several 610 researchers were named to the annual list identifying scientists and social scientists who produced multiple papers ranking in the top 1% of citations for their field and year of publication. Congratulations to Matthew Rodell (610), Gregory Faluvegi (611/CU), Alexei Lyapustin (613), Joanna Joiner (614), Jeffrey Masek (618), Douglas Morton (618), Benjamin Poulter (618), and Eric Vermote (619) for being named to this year's list.
Congratulations to Jeffrey Masek, Douglas Morton, and Benjamin Poulter for being named to the 2020 Clarivate Web of Science Highly Cited Researchers List. Recipients are recognized for their exceptional research influence, demonstrated by the production of multiple highly cited papers that rank in the top 1% by citations for field and year in Web of Science.
Ben Poulter (618) was interviewed by Science about how COVID-19 has caused a decline in fires in the Southeastern United States and what this means for fuel reduction and future fire risk.
Assaf Anyamba (618/USRA) is featured in the new Netflix series Connected: The Hidden Science of Everything hosted by Latif Nasser. In "Clouds" (Episode 5), Anyamba describes how massive amounts of NASA satellite-derived climate data and disease data from a variety of sources are combined using cloud computing technology and machine learning methods to map and forecast areas at potential risk for disease outbreaks globally. He also illustrates how these satellite measurements are related to focal ground observations of the environment and mosquito vector populations that drive disease outbreaks. Filming locations included Goddard’s Scientific Visualization Studio (August 2019) and a field site in Free State Province, South Africa (September 2019).
Trudging through snow up to their thighs, researchers Nicholas Hasson and Phil Hanke pull 200 pounds of equipment through boreal terrain near Fairbanks, Alaska. Once they reach their destination – a frozen, collapsing lake — they drill through two feet of ice to access frigid water containing copious amounts of methane.
As people celebrated the first Earth Day 50 years ago, NASA engineers and scientists were hard at work on a new remote sensing mission. While astronaut photos provided spectacular glimpses of our home planet in the vastness of space, and weather satellites showed clouds moving across oceans and continents, this new satellite would collect digital information on Earth’s surface at a much finer scale. It was called the Earth Resources Technology Satellite, or ERTS, and with it scientists could study forests, crop fields, urban areas and more – assuming they had the specialized, bulky devices needed to view an image.
In the early 2000s, the Brazilian rainforest was losing more than 8,000 square miles per year, an area nearly the size of New Jersey. But beginning in 2004, following several years of particularly rapid deforestation, the tide abruptly turned. Within a few years of adopting aggressive new environmental regulations, large-scale deforestation dropped by roughly 50 percent. By 2012, forest clearing was down nearly 80 percent.
New Hampshire hosts nearly 200 species of songbirds, but quieter forests are concerning conservationists as populations and diversity of the musical species decrease. NASA satellite data helped map the changing forest landscape, better equipping land managers to react to effects of forest fragmentation and changing songbird populations.
Goddard Space Flight Center airborne campaigns are highlighted in a recent Capital Weather Gang article in The Washington Post. The article describes the novel coronavirus's impact on scientific research and field campaigns.
Condense 48 years into six seconds, and Alaska’s glaciers move at a pace that’s anything but glacial. The rivers of ice flow and surge and shift and retreat, and time-lapse videos created from decades of satellite images track the changes over time.
After visiting with part of the SnowEx 2020 airborne team, we headed up the mountain to rendezvous with the ground team, stationed at Grand Mesa Lodge.
At a majestic 10,500 feet elevation, Grand Mesa is the world’s tallest mesa, or flat-topped mountain. It’s also the site of an intense month of data collection by NASA’s SnowEx 2020, a ground and airborne campaign testing a variety of instruments that measure the water contained in winter snowpack.
Several 610 researchers were named to the annual list identifying scientists and social scientists who produced multiple papers ranking in the top 1% of citations for their field and year of publication. Congratulations to Greg Faluvegi (611/CU), Cynthia Rosenzweig (611), Alex Ruane (611), Joanna Joiner (614), Matthew Rodell (617), Jeffrey Masek (618), Douglas Morton (618), and Benjamin Poulter (618),