Senior consultant Short & Associates, Inc Retired NPOESS Chief Scientist
It was realized at the turn of the century that a hallmark of the Twenty-First Century was the emergence of globalization in many areas important to society. An important factor in achieving globalization to improve societal conditions would be the establishment of a global, integrated Earth observing system. At the present time such a system – a Global Earth Observation System of Systems - GEOSS is being planned and formulated.
In the last six years, many national and international agencies have met and agreed to the development of a cooperative strategy for understanding the Earth’s environment and its interactions with the peoples of the Earth. Several high-level activities have culminated in Earth Observation Summits, Group on Earth Observations Plenary Meetings and GEO Ministerial Summits and several Working Groups, Task Forces and Committees.
This seminar will be a discussion of the construct, the essentially worldwide participation, the potential impacts and the status of such a GEOSS. GEOSS is being planned to make significant contributions initially to nine broad-reaching “societal benefit areas” - disaster reduction, health, energy resources, water resources, weather, climate, oceans, ecosystems-biodiversity, agriculture, and combating desertification. In this period of human history of observed global warming, the GEOSS societal benefit area highlighted will be Global Climate Change and Variability since global, accurate, spatial and temporal climate observations will/should be so
important in helping to make informed decisions and monitoring any impacts of those decisions by and for the societies of the earth.
The emphasis will be on 1) some of the planned and still existing space-borne remote sensing systems, such as the U.S. NPOESS, NPP and the A-Train and the European MetOp, acting in real and virtual constellations of satellite systems that are being considered for incorporation into a GEOSS and 2) their ability to measure some of the identified critical and essential climate parameters/variables needed for a meaningful global climate change observing program.
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Serving as:
• Senior consultant, Short & Associates, Inc Served as:
• NPOESS Chief Scientist
• Deputy Director – Advanced Technology & Plans for Program Executive Office for Environmental Monitoring
• Research Manager for NPOESS government science research and applications program
• NPOESS Calibration/Validation Team Lead
• Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) since 1965
Director – Digital Image Processing Laboratory
Branch Head – Imaging Systems Research, Remote Sensing Division, NRL
Education:
BS (Physics), Fairfield University, 1964
PhD (Astronomy/Astrophysics), Georgetown Univ., 1972
Post-Doctoral Fellow (Radio Astronomy), Naval Research Laboratory, 1972-1974