CIRES Earth Lab Analytics Hub: Turning Earth Data into Knowledge

ABSTRACT: Earth Lab is a new synthesis center at the University of Colorado Boulder exploring fundamental drivers of environmental change and extreme events and their impacts on our health, livelihoods, settlements, and ecosystems. The research spans from understanding forest dynamics in the Colorado Rockies to permafrost dynamics across the Arctic. We bring researchers and experts in remote sensing, data science and computation together with cloud computing, and open, reproducible tools to help researchers tackle the complexity, volume and variety of Earth data. We are pursuing new research frontiers in machine learning algorithms as a means to link forest observations across spatial scales and to sort through millions of tweets to find information about social disruption caused by wildfires, weather extremes and natural disasters. We continue to look for new opportunities to build our capacity and capabilities through engagement across the university and with our federal agency and industry partners to accelerate data-intensive discovery.

BIO: Brian Johnson is the Director of CIRES/Earth Lab’s Analytics Hub and the Deputy University Director of the USGS North Central Climate Adaption Science Center at CU. He has B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin, and a Ph.D. in Atmospheric and Space Sciences from the University of Michigan. Brian has been involved in developing aircraft and satellite remote sensing systems and investigating new ways to apply these technologies to Earth science research and environmental monitoring. His current research interest is in the application of machine learning methods to link disparate Earth observations across spatial and temporal scales, and mine the huge volume and variety of Earth data to study the pace and pattern of environmental change.