Date:
Location:
Presenter
Dr. Compton J. Tucker
Abstract
Dr. Compton Tucker will describe the marriage of commercial satellite data, machine learning with high performance computing, and field measurements, which together enabled the carbon content of ten billion semi-arid trees to be estimated with an uncertainty of ±20% over an area of 10 million km2. Dr Tucker found that his team's results differ from all previous studies using observations, and from numerical simulation models. The voluminous output data required the development of a viewer for interrogation/use of the team's results. Because of the extensive training data, the team found minimal improvement adding additional satellite data and from cloud & aerosol screening. The results appeared in the March 2, 2023 issue of Nature.
Speaker's Bio
Compton Tucker, a native of Carlsbad New Mexico, received his B.S. degree in biological science in 1969 from Colorado State University in Ft. Collins. After working for Colorado National Bank in Denver and the First National Bank in Albuquerque, he returned to Colorado State University for graduate school in Earth science. He received his M.S in 1973 and his Ph.D. in 1975, both from the College of Forestry. In 1975, he came to NASA/Goddard as a National Academy of Sciences post-doctoral fellow, and in 1977 became an employee of NASA. At NASA/Goddard, Tucker has used satellite data to study the Earth, in research areas that include famine early warning, deforestation, desert boundary determination, ecologically-coupled diseases, terrestrial primary production, food security, and identifying degraded lands. Since 2014, he has devoted most of his time complimenting NASA satellite observations with commercial satellite data. He took part from 2002 to 2012 in NASA’s Space Archaeology Program, leading a group that assisted archaeologists mapping ancient sites with ground-penetrating radar and magnetometry in Turkey, at the sites of Troy of Trojan War fame, in the Granicus River Valley, and at Gordion, the home of King Midas. He has authored or coauthored more than 220 journal articles that have been cited more than 32,000 times according to the Web of Science and more than 87,000 time according to Google Scholar. He has a Google Scholar "H" index of 130 and a Google Scholar "H" index since 2018 of 72. He is an adjunct professor at the University of Maryland and is a consulting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. He taught "Introduction to Remote Sensing" seven times at the University of Maryland, which forced him to learn the subject better. He has appeared on more than forty radio and TV programs. He is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union & the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has been awarded several medals and honors, including NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal, the Pecora Award from the U.S. Geological Survey, the National Air and Space Museum Trophy for Current Achievement, the Henry Shaw Medal from the Missouri Botanical Garden, the Galathea Medal from the Royal Danish Geographical Society, the Vega Medal from the Swedish Society of Anthropology and Geography, and the Mongolian Friendship Medal.
Lunch will be served to those in attendence.
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