Description

This fellowship opportunity supports research aimed at improving the characterization of coastal and terrestrial-aquatic interface (TAI) areas through the use of remote sensing data collected from ground, airborne, and space platforms. The research focuses on diverse biomes including tropical, temperate, and Arctic environments. It seeks to determine how well fine to coarse resolution remote sensing data can represent terrain and properties of vegetation, soils, water, and landscape features across gradients from shallow water to beach to wetlands, as well as detect seasonal and interannual changes.

The research combines high-altitude and surface-proximity remote sensing techniques, including hyperspectral sensors covering spectral ranges from ultraviolet (UV) to long-wave infrared, with detailed ground-based validation data. The goal is to develop improved representations of vegetation, soil, and water properties to understand the current state, historical changes, and future predictions of TAIs. Modeling approaches that capture terrain function gradients or TAI processes, and that incorporate physics of remote sensing, are of particular interest.

The Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) maintains advanced facilities including a spectral calibration lab, soil laboratory, and a broad suite of airborne sensors such as lidar and hyperspectral cameras spanning 300 nm to 2500 nm, plus mid-wave and long-wave thermal imaging. The research group routinely collects data worldwide using various aircraft and supports Navy and US Marine Corps applications through data processing, analysis, modeling, and product generation.

Keywords

Applied Remote Sensing, Physics of Remote Sensing, Spectral Remote Sensing, Earth and Environmental Science, Imaging Spectroscopy, Hyperspectral, Multispectral, Lidar, Field Validation, Multi-Sensor Data Fusion