Projects

CoastWatch Satellite Course

Creation of the CoastWatch Satellite Course in 2006, a short 3-4 day course aimed at exposing scientists from NOAA Fisheries (but open to anyone) to environmental satellite data and showing them ways to easily access the data to use in in their operational work flows. To date over 700 people have taken the course, 57% from NOAA, and 25% from academia. During COVID the courses were converted to be virtual. Shorter versions of the course are also routinely offered in-person, in conjunction with scientific conferences and also online.

North Pacific Chlorophyll Blooms

Research done on the North Pacific Chlorophyll Blooms. In 2003 I wrote the first paper about the large anomalous chlorophyll blooms that develop in the Northeast Pacific Ocean almost every summer. These blooms were only identified from satellite data and cannot be explained by conventional oceanographic processes and we still don’t know what causes them. I have authored or co-authored around a dozen papers on this subject. One of these papers was written as part of a competition and was the winner of Liquid Robotic’s Pax-X challenge.

Creation of PolarWatch

Establishment of the PolarWatch node of NOAA’s CoastWatch program, that serves users working with satellite data in polar regions where there are unique needs – users who work in these regions need sea-ice data, which previously hasn’t been part of the suite of satellite products readily available from CoastWatch, and data needs to be made available in projections suitable for high latitudes. PolarWatch addresses both of these issues.

ShipWatch

Establishment of ShipWatch, NOAA’s CoastWatch program to automatically send daily satellite images to all of the 16 ships that are part of the NOAA fleet.

Shipboard radiometers

Proposed the installation of hyperspectral radiometers on NOAA’s ships, to routinely collect hyperspectral data whenever the ships are underway which will help make connections between satellite data and in-situ data collected by surveys. We were successful in getting IRA (Inflation Reduction Act) funds in 2024 to purchase 2 DALEC instruments as part of a pilot program.

Biogeochemical-Argo (BGC-Argo)

Advocating for the use of Biogeochemical-Argo (BGC-Argo) data within NOAA Fisheries. I was asked to chair a session on Fisheries during the international “Global Biogeochemical-Argo Fleet: Knowledge to Action Workshop” in May/June 2021. I was on the planning committee for the BGC-Argo & Fisheries workshop held at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in June 2022 where we presented work on using BGC-Argo data to understand chinstrap penguin migrations. This work was published in Jan 2025.