Speaker: Jessica Fayne, assistant professor, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Topic:  How can we measure surface water from space?
 

Abstract
Global water resources are changing as our climate changes. Non-uniform warming patterns melt permafrost in the Arctic while driving increases in evaporation globally. While advancements in satellite remote sensing and modeling have enabled improvements in our understanding of global water availability and movement, our global knowledge of water availability is broad scale at best. Regions of the world with significant infrastructure for in-situ observations are better studied and understood. In contrast, other areas lacking a robust network of in-situ observations are less commonly studied. Remote sensing can directly observe certain hydrological phenomena, such as water cover fraction and vegetation greenness, as well as indirectly observe other phenomena, such as vegetation health, surface water storage, biomass, and wind speeds. This talk will provide an overview of well-known and emerging remote sensing instruments and methods for studying the water cycle and will also discuss a specific ongoing project to retrieve vegetation leaf structure and moisture content from the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) Mission, a spaceborne, high-frequency Ka-band SAR. SWOT was not designed to measure vegetation structure or water content, but can it?

Bio
Dr. Jessica Fayne's research background is in GIS, Remote Sensing, and Hydrology, with previous extensive study of Political Science, Urban Planning, and Architecture. Dr. Fayne has a Masters Degree in Geographic and Cartographic Sciences from George Mason University and a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Fascinated by developing new algorithms for retrieving hydrologic parameters with remote sensing data, Dr. Fayne has collaborated and researched at various NASA centers since 2014. Dr. Fayne is a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Earth and Environmental Sciences Department at the University of Michigan. As a research advisor, Dr. Fayne is the Principal Investigator of the Hydrology, Land Use, and Climate Change (HYLUCC) Lab at the University of Michigan and is also a Scientific Advisor for the NASA DEVELOP program. Research at the HYLUCC Lab focuses on developing new methods to study how climate change drives hydroclimatic hazards.

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