Dr. Thomas H. Painter and Dr. Son V. Nghiem, Researchers of JIFRESSE, have been elected as 2019 AGU Fellows for their scientific eminence in the Earth and space sciences. Only 0.1% of AGU membership receives this recognition in any given year.
Dr. Thomas H. Painter is a Principal Scientist and Scientist V at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology and a Researcher at JIFRESSE, UCLA. His research centers on snow hydrology and more specifically the remote sensing of snow. He is internationally recognized for his sustained contributions to the understanding of the cryosphere. Dr. Painter has pioneered our understanding of the impacts of dust emission from land use change on snow and ice cover in mountain systems and the hydrologic response and impacts of black carbon on regional glaciation in the Anthropocene. He has also developed cutting edge remote sensing and field models for snow properties from multispectral to imaging spectrometer sensors, scanning lidar systems, and radar systems. Dr. Painter has served on a number of national and international panels and is a Past-President of the Cryosphere Focus Group of the American Geophysical Union. In 2018, he was awarded the NASA Exceptional Technology Achievement Medal and the Bureau of Reclamation’s John W. Keys III Award.
Dr. Nghiem is a Senior Research Scientist, the Science Applications Development Lead of the Radar Science and Engineering Section, and the JPL Hydrology Discipline Program Manager of the Hydrology Office in the Earth Science and Technology Directorate. He is also affiliated with JIFRESSE, UCLA. His research encompasses active and passive remote sensing, development of advanced satellite radars and radiometers, electromagnetic scattering and emission modeling, and earth sciences and applications from the tropics to polar regions. He received the 1999 Lew Allen Award for Excellence in recognition of his pioneering research in the areas of polarimetric scatterometry for Earth science remote sensing and contributions to future advanced satellite instrument concepts, the 2006 NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal for developing scientific applications of scatterometry in land, ice, and snow processes, the 2008 NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal for his contributions to understanding the melt state of Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets, its significance in Earth science missions, and its implications in climate change, the 2010 NASA Exceptional Technology Achievement Medal for his contributions in developing a new technology using NASA satellite scatterometer data to measure high-resolution global wind for off-shore wind energy development, and the 2013 Edward Stones Award for outstanding research publication on the extreme melt across the Greenland ice sheet in summer 2012.
The 2019 Class of AGU Fellows Announcement can be found at: https://eos.org/agu-news/2019-class-of-agu-fellows-announced?utm_source=aguniverse&utm_medium=email