Albert is a technical manager in NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s Earth Sciences Division (ESD). He currently serves as the ESD Airborne Sciences Support Lead and is the Deputy Investigation Manager for the airborne component of the Snow4Flow Earth Venture Suborbital (EVS-4) mission. He has over a decade of experience planning and executing airborne science missions, including hundreds of flight hours on field campaigns investigating aspects of the Earth's atmosphere, cryosphere, hydrology, and biodiversity from South Africa to the Arctic Ocean. His research background includes astrodynamics, satellite navigation, software-defined radio, and microwave and laser remote sensing.
Albert Wu
(PRINCIPAL SUPPORT SCIENTIST)
| Email: | albert.wu@nasa.gov |
| Phone: | 301.286.7766 |
| Org Code: | 61A |
| Address: |
NASA/GSFC Mail Code 610.9 Greenbelt, MD 20771 |
| Employer: | ADNET SYSTEMS INC |
Brief Bio
Current Projects
Snow4Flow
Remote Sensing
Quantifying the ongoing retreat of glaciers and ice sheets – and projecting their futures – are major societal concerns due to their contribution to sea-level rise and influence on water resources, natural hazards, and associated socioeconomic impacts. The ability to confidently project glacier and ice-sheet mass change is limited by a severe lack of observations that reliably constrain both their input (Snow) and output (Flow) mass fluxes. Snow4Flow will capture the spatial variability in snow accumulation and ice volume across 4 Northern Hemisphere (NH) regions containing hundreds of rapidly changing glaciers to deliver more reliable, societally relevant projections of land-ice change. This major advance requires spatially extensive radar-sounding surveys that are not possible from orbit. This EVS-4 mission will drive foundational improvements to NH land-ice boundary conditions and forcing data – including orographic precipitation patterns in alpine environments, ice thickness and subglacial topography – and directly leverages them into state-of-the-art models and projections.
Land, Vegetation, and Ice Sensor (LVIS)
Remote Sensing
NASA's Land, Vegetation, and Ice Sensor (LVIS) is an airborne, wide-swath imaging laser altimeter system that is flown over target areas to collect data on surface topography and 3D structure. Since 2017, the sensor has been operating as a NASA Facility, providing low cost data to NASA investigators and science missions.
Scanning L-band Active/Passive (SLAP)
Remote Sensing
The Scanning L-band Active/Passive (SLAP) instrument is an airborne imaging radiometer and scatterometer developed at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center for remote sensing of soil moisture, ocean salinity, freeze-thaw state, and other physical phenomena that display characteristics at microwave L-band.
Developed in the Hydrological Sciences Laboratory with contractor support, its purpose is to provide airborne science as well as validation for the SMAP mission as well as other L-band active/passive missions (Aquarius, SMOS).
Special Experience
Recent Field Campaigns:
2024, Snow4Flow EVS, Deputy Investigation Manager – Airborne
2024, West-coast & Heartland Hyperspectral Microwave Intensive Experiment (WH2yMSIE), Project Manager
2024, Arctic Radiation-Cloud-Aerosol-Surface Interaction Experiment (ARCSIX), Land, Vegetation, and Ice Sensor (LVIS) Operations
2024, ICESat-2 Lake Ice, LVIS Operations
2023, Biodiversity Survey of the Cape (BioSCape), LVIS Operations
2023, FireSense, Scanning L-band Active/Passive (SLAP) Instrument Lead
2023, Student Airborne Research Program - East Coast, SLAP Instrument Lead
2023, AfriSAR-2, LVIS Operations
2023, CryoUAS KU Snow Radar on Platform Aerospace Vanilla UAS, Mission Manager
2022, CReSIS Snow Radar Mission Support, LVIS Technical Manager
2021, Land Surface Interactions with the Atmosphere over the Iberian Semi-arid Environment (LIAISE), SLAP Instrument Lead
2020, SnowEx, Acting Airborne Sciences Manager
2019, Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE), LVIS Technical Manager
2019, Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) Calibration/Validation, LVIS Technical Manager
2018, Great Plains Irrigation Experiment (GRAINEX), Goddard RF Explorer (GREX) Instrument Lead
2017, SnowEx, Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) P-3 Instrument Integration
2016, Signals of Opportunity Airborne Demonstrator (SoOp-AD), SLAP Instrument Lead
2015, SLAPex Freeze/Thaw, SLAP Instrument Lead
Education
Graduate Certificate in International Science and Technology Policy – George Washington University, 2018
M.Eng. in Aerospace Engineering Sciences – University of Colorado at Boulder, 2010
B.S. in Aerospace Engineering Sciences – University of Colorado at Boulder, 2008
Publications
Refereed
2023. "High-Resolution Soil Moisture—a European Airborne Campaign Using NASA Goddard’s Scanning L-Band Active Passive (SLAP)." Remote Sensing in Earth Systems Sciences 6 (3-4): 309-321 [10.1007/s41976-023-00099-4] [Journal Article/Letter]