Forrest Williams is a newly minted Ph.D., having successfully defended his thesis near the end of 2022 at New Zealand’s Massey University, where his focus was geology. The topic? Large landslides in New Zealand and how satellite data can track them so that scientists can understand the causes. Landslides are a serious problem in many …
Sometime back in the early 2000s, Rowena Lohman attended an Alaska Satellite Facility Working Group meeting as a substitute for someone who couldn’t make it that day. She’s been connected to the Alaska Satellite Facility ever since. “So I’ve been interacting with folks there for a long time,” she said. Now a professor of geophysics …
Simon Zwieback’s office has little space in which to maneuver on this particular day in the West Ridge Research Building at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Boxes of equipment and supplies dot the floor in preparation for a research trip to the far north in Alaska. It will be the first of three visits the …
For Matthew Pritchard, volcanoes are where the action is. The more of them he can study, the happier he is. The Alaska Satellite Facility at the University of Alaska Fairbanks has been essential to that happiness. In the early years of his research, the range of the satellite facility’s download mask allowed him to study …
Ian Joughin is quite familiar with the Alaska Satellite Facility. That familiarity began during his time in graduate school and continued at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, where he began work in 1995. It’s present in his current work as a glaciologist at the University of Washington Polar Science Center and in preparations …
As ASF Chief Scientist, Franz J. Meyer leverages almost two decades of remote sensing research experience to act as the interface between ASF and the scientific community. View Scientist Spotlight Meyer has spent his career working with space agencies around the world to develop processing techniques and methods for synthetic aperture radar, or SAR, data. …
If you want an idea of how long Howard Zebker has been immersed professionally with satellites and satellite data, just look up the launch date of NASA’s Seasat mission. June 28, 1978. Seasat was one of the first Earth-observing satellites and was designed to provide data about the planet’s oceans. It was the first time …
Josef Kellndorfer heartily remembers receiving computer hard drives in the mail containing the data he needed for his research in the 1990s. Those hard drives came from the Alaska Satellite Facility (ASF), traveling the roughly 4,400 miles to Massachusetts, where he worked at the Woods Hole Research Center, now known as the Woodwell Climate Research …
As Director of ASF, Dr. Nettie La Belle-Hamer’s mission is to support and mentor her team of driven professionals as leaders in remote sensing and data accessibility. She applies her research background in space physics to guide the facility as it provides high-quality data to meet the evolving needs of its users. Dr. La Belle-Hamer …
Dr. Paul Rosen is Project Scientist for the NASA-ISRO SAR (NISAR) mission. NISAR will measure Earth’s changing ecosystems, dynamic land surfaces, and ice masses, providing critical measurements for carbon cycle modeling, natural hazards research, sea level rise, groundwater exploitation, and more. With its all-weather, day/night, multi-frequency, polarimetric capability, NISAR will also support a host of …
