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NASA Ames Earth Science

Significant announcements:

29th June 2020

2020 Ames NASA Honor Awards – Ten awards were received across the Earth Science Division and its collaborative organizations, testifying to the outstanding achievements and hard work our staff is doing to advance NASA’s mission. An awards ceremony is being planned; it may be virtual given COVID-19 related constraints.

  • Outstanding Leadership Medal: Matthew Fladeland (SG). Awarded in recognition of sustained leadership in the Earth Science Division. Matt is the Airborne Science Manager at Ames and served as acting Division Chief and subsequently as acting Deputy Division Chief until fall 2019.
  • Exceptional Public Service Medal: Sommer Nicholas (ESPO). Awarded for outstanding performance in support of NASA’s Earth Science Division’s Research and Analysis Program and the Earth System Science Pathfinder and Airborne Science Programs.
  • Exceptional Public Service Medal: Jeffrey Myers (SG). Awarded for consistent and exceptional technical leadership of the Ames Airborne Sensor Facility in support of the Earth Observing System and Airborne Science Programs.
  • Exceptional Achievement Medal: Aaron Duley (TI). Awarded for exceptional leadership and development of the NASA Airborne Science Mission Tools Suite through the entire software lifecycle and throughout its operations.
  • Exceptional Technology Achievement Medal: Ian Brosnan (SG). Awarded for exceptional leadership in collaboration in achieving significant technology infusion of AIST technologies into the SBG mission study and airborne soil moisture measurement.
  • Early Career Achievement Medal: Matthew Johnson (SGE). Awarded for his interdisciplinary science leadership in atmospheric and terrestrial sciences studying the planetary boundary layer.
  • Early Career Achievement Medal: Meloë Kacenelenbogen (SGG). Awarded for exceptional leadership of the Sunphotometer Satellite group at NASA Ames during an extended lapse in senior scientific leadership.
  • Group Achievement Award (GAA): CAMP2Ex (The Cloud, Aerosol and Monsoon Processes Philippines Experiment). Awarded for outstanding scientific achievements of the Clouds, Aerosol, and Monsoon Processes – Philippines Experiment (CAMP2Ex) airborne Earth Science Mission team.
  • Group Achievement Award (GAA): C-HARRIER (Coastal High Acquisition Rate Radiometers Team). Awarded for development and flight-testing of a new airborne optical instrument package for the characterization of coastal and inland waters biological conditions and water quality.
  • Group Achievement Award (GAA): FIREX-AQ (Fire Influence on Regional to Global Environments and Air Quality). Awarded for outstanding scientific achievements of the Fire Influence on Regional to Global Environments Experiment – Air Quality (FIREX-AQ) airborne Earth science mission team.
  • NASA Ames is in Stage 3 in the NASA Response Framework to pandemics – Staff are continuing work with adjustments in work style, focus and schedules due to the COVID-19 distancing protocols. ESPO-managed NASA airborne missions and other programs and projects at ARC are experiencing major schedule delays due to COVID-19. Ames Earth Science Division staff are focusing on data analysis, publications/proposals/reports writing, and computer-aided design work. Staff are continuing telework and managing workflows and productivity while travel, lab work and mission-critical flight and instrument work are on hold. The division is actively engaged with the directorate/center and with HQ on obtaining “mission-critical” designation from HQ for a number of select facilities and activities and has begun drafting return-to-onsite-work implementation plans. 
  • COVID-19 Response – Several teams have actively responded to the short-fuse Announcement of Opportunity (AO) from HQ – Rapid Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic (ROSES2020, A.28) – and other proposal preparation activities. Several submitted concepts have received a go-ahead from HQ for a full proposal, and three full proposals have been submitted. The Biospheric Science Branch (Code SGE) together with Codes TI, D, and the GeneLab project (Code SCR) are also exploring analytical capabilities of environmental factors with the help of the NASA Earth Exchange (NEX). 
    Link to the Rapid Response AO: https://nspires.nasaprs.com/external/solicitations/summary!init.do?solId=%7b3F3DFBFB-8FEE-F317-63FD-CB84ECA833EC%7d

22nd June 2020

  • High-Altitude Long-Endurance UAS Partnership with US Forest Service through NASA SBIR Phase IIE – The Ames Office of Airborne Science within the Earth Science Division supports the Airborne Science Program (ASP) with new technology infusion to enable new observations. The High-Altitude Long-Endurance (HALE) UAS capability assessment project (PI: Matt Fladeland) has just secured a $1M+ partnership with the USFS to demonstrate the capability of the newly developed Swift Ultra Long Endurance UAS, a NASA Small Business Innovative Research Phase II project to build and demonstrate a 30+ day endurance aircraft. The USFS plans to deploy a variety of cameras in the visible, shortwave, and longwave infrared coupled with onboard processing and high-speed telemetry to demonstrate real-time fire observations. Swift Engineering (PI: Andrew Streett) has submitted a Phase IIE proposal to NASA that might provide up to $375K in matching funding for this effort. NASA matching funding will explore integration of payloads to support radiation measurements, magnetic fields, and imaging spectroscopy, in coordination with several NASA, DOE, and USGS teams. NASA Earth Science has worked closely with Mike Stewart to develop an Interagency Agreement to enable his office to support USFS with Airworthiness and Flight Safety Reviews, as well as Certificate of Authorization (COA) development. The flights are scheduled to take place in June 2021.
  • NASA Ames is in transition from Stage 4 down to Stage 3 in the NASA Response Framework to pandemics – Staff are continuing work with adjustments in work style, focus and schedules due to the COVID-19 distancing protocols. ESPO-managed NASA airborne missions and other programs and projects at ARC are experiencing major schedule delays due to COVID-19. Ames staff are focusing on data analysis, publications/proposals/reports writing, and computer-aided design work. Staff are continuing telework and managing workflows and productivity while travel, lab work and mission-critical flight and instrument work are on hold. The division is actively engaged with the directorate/center and with HQ on obtaining “mission-critical” designation from HQ for a number of select facilities and activities and has begun drafting return-to-onsite-work implementation plans. 
  • Earth Science Decadal Survey Designated Observables: Surface Biology & Geology (SBG) – The ARC Surface Biology & Geology (SBG) team completed their study of an augmenting small satellite constellation for the SBG Observing System, an important milestone in the pre-Phase A study and a significant accomplishment for the ARC team led by Anh Nguyen and Adam Zufall. An augmenting constellation offers improved revisit and taskable event-driven measurements. The team evaluated the size, cost, coverage, and revisit of several constellation designs employing and their findings will inform the SBG architecture recommendations presented to NASA Headquarters in late-July. An augmenting constellation is feasible if NASA finds international partners for the SBG observing system. Several have expressed interest and we anticipate that ARC will be asked to conduct more detailed studies of the most promising constellation architectures.
  • COVID-19 Response – Several teams have actively responded to the short-fuse Announcement of Opportunity (AO) from HQ – Rapid Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic (ROSES2020, A.28) – and other proposal preparation activities. Several submitted concepts have received a go-ahead from HQ for a full proposal, and three full proposals have been submitted. The Biospheric Science Branch (Code SGE) together with Codes TI, D, and the GeneLab project (Code SCR) are also exploring analytical capabilities of environmental factors with the help of the NASA Earth Exchange (NEX). 
    Link to the Rapid Response AO: https://nspires.nasaprs.com/external/solicitations/summary!init.do?solId=%7b3F3DFBFB-8FEE-F317-63FD-CB84ECA833EC%7d

15th June 2020

  • Florian Schwandner was featured in an article on interdisciplinary science in the Washington Post on 8June 2020. The article describes a field experiment at Rincón de la Vieja volcano in Costa Rica as part of a multi-year cross-disciplinary initiative originally conceived by Schwandner in 2016, and co-led by him together with JPL PI Josh Fisher. This multi-center initiative with US and international partners in Costa Rica and Canada explores how climate change, tropical ecology and volcanology can come together to solve some of the most pressing scientific challenges of our time, including how the tropical terrestrial biomass will respond to more intense CO2 exposure 50-200 years from now. This proposed natural experiment dubbed ELEVATE (Enhanced Levels of Emissions in Volcanically Active Tropical Ecosystems) provides a window into the future by making use of natural and continuous cold volcanic CO2 gas seeps flooding the forests on the slopes of tropical volcanoes to simulate future conditions.
    NASA HQ Earth Science Division Deputy Director Sandra Cauffman, a native Costa Rican, tweeted a link to the article, tagging the Costa Rican president, among others.
    Link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2020/06/08/clues-impact-climate-change-may-seep-volcano-costa-rica
  • NASA Ames has begun transition from Stage 4 down to Stage 3 in the NASA Response Framework to pandemics – Staff are continuing work with adjustments in work style, focus and schedules due to the COVID-19 distancing protocols. ESPO-managed NASA airborne missions and other programs and projects at ARC are experiencing major schedule delays due to COVID-19. Ames staff are focusing on data analysis, publications/proposals/reports writing, and computer-aided design work. Staff are continuing telework and managing workflows and productivity while travel, lab work and mission-critical flight and instrument work are on hold. The division is engaged with the directorate/center and with HQ on obtaining “mission-critical” designation from HQ for a number of select facilities and activities.
  • COVID-19 Response – Several teams have actively responded to the short-fuse Announcement of Opportunity (AO) from HQ – Rapid Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic (ROSES2020, A.28) – and other proposal preparation activities. Several submitted concepts have received a go-ahead from HQ for a full proposal, and three full proposals have been submitted. The Biospheric Science Branch (Code SGE) together with Codes TI, D, and the GeneLab project (Code SCR) are also exploring analytical capabilities of environmental factors with the help of the NASA Earth Exchange (NEX).
    Link to the Rapid Response AO:https://nspires.nasaprs.com/external/solicitations/summary!init.do?solId=%7b3F3DFBFB-8FEE-F317-63FD-CB84ECA833EC%7d

8th June 2020

2020 Interns are arriving virtually – Intern onboarding is in full swing; examples of the exciting projects commencing include:

  • The 2020 Summer DEVELOP team at Ames starts their 10-week term on 1 June; they are partnering with the Nature Conservancy’s Washington State Chapter and the Puget Sound Clean Air Agency to assess impacts of wildfire smoke on surrounding air quality in the Pacific Northwest over the last two decades. This project will integrate MODIS, VIIRS, CALIPSO, and Sentinel-5P data to map wildfire emissions over time and create a web-based tool to visualize air quality data across the study area, where on-the-ground sensors can be geographically sparse.
  • The Center for Applied Atmospheric Research and Education (CAARE) summer internships kicked off this week with six interns starting on 1 June and with four to start on 15 June. These interns are working in an all virtual environment with many SG researchers on projects related to science communication, methane emissions, coral reef health, air quality, atmospheric rivers, snowpack and drought monitoring. These students are mentored by scientists across the Earth Science Division.
  • The Earth Science Project Office (ESPO) hosted the virtual meetings for the PBL (Planetary Boundary Layer) Decadal Workshop on the mornings of 19, 20, 26 and 27 May by using Webex Events. The meeting was initially planned to be held in Maryland but due to travel restrictions was converted to a 100% remote meeting. The workshop garnered interest from over 270 people and had up to 195 concurrent attendees, spanning 9 time zones. The workshop included 30 invited talks, 49 lightning talks as well as lively question and answer sessions with raised hands for audio in addition to online questions/answers.
  • Applied Sciences – Forrest Melton is presenting on remote sensing of cover crops to program officers of the Walton Family Foundation on 4 June.
  • NASA Ames is still at Level 4, the highest level in the NASA Response Framework to pandemics – Major adjustments in work style, focus and schedules due to the COVID-19 distancing protocols – ESPO managed NASA airborne missions and other programs and projects at ARC are experiencing major schedule delays due to COVID-19. Ames staff are focusing on data analysis, publications/proposals/reports writing, and computer-aided design work. Staff are continuing telework and managing workflows and productivity while travel, lab work and mission-critical flight and instrument work are on hold.
  • COVID-19 response – Several teams have actively responded to the short-fuse Announcement of Opportunity (AO) from HQ – Rapid Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic (ROSES2020, A.28) – and other proposal preparation activities. Several submitted concepts have received a go-ahead from HQ, for a full proposal, and three full proposals have been submitted. The Biospheric Science branch (SGE) together with Code TI, Code D, and the GeneLab project (Code SCR) are also exploring furthering analytical capabilities of environmental factors with the help of the NASA Earth Exchange (NEX).
    Link to the Rapid Response AO: https://nspires.nasaprs.com/external/solicitations/summary!init.do?solId=%7b3F3DFBFB-8FEE-F317-63FD-CB84ECA833EC%7d

1st June 2020

  • The Earth Science Project Office (ESPO) has published a video to illustrate their essential contributions to airborne science at NASA. ESPO manages Earth science field campaigns for the agency at deployment sites around the globe. They provide planning, implementation and post-mission support for large, complex, multi-agency, national and international field campaigns, with over 50 missions under their belt to date, since 1987.
    Link: http://espo.nasa.gov/
    Video: https://youtu.be/8hCH3IYhn4g
  • NASA Western Water Applications Office (WWAO) – Amber McCullum appointed WWAO Impact and Transition Lead – Dr. Mccullum has been appointed to this new role, significantly adding to the Ames footprint in the WWAO leadership team (F. Melton, L. Johnson, F. Schwandner, M. Fladeland). As the WWAO Impact and Transition Lead, she will coordinate with project leads and the WWAO program office to assess, characterize, and communicate the benefits of project outcomes to people and the environment. This will include facilitating a community of practice around research to operations through a series of workshops and strategies for the successful transition of project applications to the public or private sector. This role will also engage more broadly with the Applied Sciences and Capacity Building Programs to facilitate collaboration and to connect research with the stakeholder community.
    Link: https://wwao.jpl.nasa.gov/
  • Aquatics Cross Mission Coordination Team for PACE, GLIMR, and SBG – Liane Guild was invited to join this newly formed team supporting cross-mission synergies and benefits for the planned NASA Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud and ocean Ecosystem (PACE), Geostationary Littoral Imaging and Monitoring Radiometer (GLIMR), and Surface Biology and Geology (SBG) missions. She is representing the aquatics efforts of SBG with Kevin Turpie (GSFC) and as co-chair of the international Aquatics Study Group that supports SBG and that previously supported the Hyperspectral Infrared Imager (HyspIRI) mission study. The charter of the Coordination Team is to identify shareable resources, mutually beneficial opportunities, overlapping activities and find ways to synergize efforts across aquatic missions in order to reduce risk, save cost and better our support of the research and applications needs of the aquatic remote sensing communities.
  • NASA Ames is still at Level 4, the highest level in the NASA Response Framework to pandemics – Major adjustments in work style, focus and schedules due to the COVID-19 distancing protocols – ESPO managed NASA airborne missions and other programs and projects at ARC are experiencing major schedule delays due to COVID-19. Ames staff are focusing on data analysis, publications/proposals/reports writing, and computer-aided design work. Staff are continuing telework and managing workflows and productivity while travel, lab work and mission-critical flight and instrument work are on hold. Several teams are now actively engaged in responding to the short-fuse Announcement of Opportunity (AO) from HQ – Rapid Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic (ROSES2020, A.28) – and other proposal preparation activities. Several submitted concepts have already received a go-ahead from HQ, for a full proposal, and first full proposals have been submitted.
    Link to the Rapid Response AO: https://nspires.nasaprs.com/external/solicitations/summary!init.do?solId=%7b3F3DFBFB-8FEE-F317-63FD-CB84ECA833EC%7d