Tag: Satellite Calibration and Validation

Lightning as an Indicator of Climate

June 17, 2022

ESSIC/CISESS scientist Daile Zhang attended and presented at the National Climate Assessment (NCA) “Lightning as an Indicator of Climate” Annual Science Meeting that was held on June 6-7 at the UMD Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science (AOSC) Atlantic Building. The meeting is an annual working group get-together for people from NASA, University of Arizona, City College of New York, University of Alabama in Huntsville, and University of Maryland on various lightning tasks/projects, including lightning climatology, lightning NOx observations, dry lightning, wildfires, and this year’s NASA Marshall Space Flight Center CubeSpark project.

Raspberry Pi Cameras Captures 7-Stroke Close-to-Ground Lightning Flash

May 26, 2022

In May, Daile Zhang, Guangyang Fang, Joseph Patton, and an AOSC undergrad student Domenic Brooks set up Raspberry Pi cameras at two locations. Now, they capture a lightning storm!

ESSIC Celebrates Maryland Day 2022

May 6, 2022

On Saturday, April 30, ESSIC faculty and staff gathered to celebrate Maryland Day, the University of Maryland’s largest community outreach event! This was the first

Quantifying and Characterizing Striping of Microwave Humidity Sounder With Observation and Simulation

May 4, 2022

ESSIC/CISESS scientists John Xun Yang, Yalei You, and Rachael Kroodsma are co-authors on a new paper in IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing alongside Sidharth Misra from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and William Blackwell from MIT Lincoln Laboratory. Blackwell is also a two-time speaker for the ESSIC Seminar Series, the most recent of which can be viewed here.

A screenshot of all attendees of the virtual meeting, smiling into their webcams!

Fangfang Yu Leads Global Space-based Inter-Calibration System Meeting

March 30, 2022

The 2022 Annual Global Space-based Inter-Calibration System (GSICS) meeting was successfully held online on 10 March 2022 and 14 – 18 March 2022. Dr. Fangfang Yu, ESSIC/CISESS Associate Research Scientist and new presiding chair of the GSICS Research Working Group (GRWG), led the effort to organize the meeting with the help of the GSICS Coordination Center (GCC) and GRWG members.

Giant miscanthus can grow up to 3-4 meters.

Growing This Plant Could Mitigate Climate Change in the Midwest

March 25, 2022

A new study including ESSIC scientist Xin-Zhong Liang has discovered that growing Miscanthus + giganteus, a type of perennial biomass crop, has a strong likelihood of significantly lowering regional summer temperatures and the vapor-pressure deficit, while increasing rainfall and overall crop productivity. This work was published in Global Change Biology-Bioenergy with Liang serving as Lead Principal Investigator. The first author, Yufeng He, is a former ESSIC Postdoctoral Associate.

Caption: Illustration of Nüwa from Classic of Mountains and Seas. Zhang accompanies the article with stark visuals of statues, temples, and art meant to illustrate and honor the gods.

The Legacy of the Chinese Lightning and Thunder Gods

March 11, 2022

ESSIC/CISESS Post-doctoral Associate Daile Zhang has written an article on the legacy of lightning and thunder gods in Chinese history that is featured in this month’s issue of Weatherwise.

Fig. 2 The GOES-East satellite Geo-Color imagery at roughly the same time.

Giant Lenticular Cloud, Seen from the Ground & in Space!

March 11, 2022

A giant lenticular cloud was seen in Maryland at about 5:50 pm on March 1st, 2022. ESSIC/CISESS Post-doctoral Associate Daile Zhang captured the cloud in Figure 1 below and a video posted to her Twitter account. GOES-East also detected the cloud as seen in Figure 2 and 3.

Two images of color composite (B1, B9, B1). On the left we see a blurry map image of 60m input, on the right the same image is clearer at 10m super resolution

Exploring Super Resolution Satellite Images with Artificial Intelligence

February 28, 2022

NOAA Center for Satellite Applications and Research (STAR) scientists are exploring new capabilities of enhancing satellite images with artificial intelligence (AI) so that moderate resolution images could be enhanced to include more detailed features with high resolution.

Leveraging Machine Learning to Improve Sea Surface Temperature Retrievals