Vipers honored at AGU's Fall Meeting

The 2017 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) was held in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, December 11-15, 2017 and featured more than 22,000 talks and poster presentations by earth and space science researchers from around the world.

Two Viper Lab members David Miller and Erin Wetherley were honored with prestigious Outstanding Student Paper Awards (OSPAs). According to AGU’s website, OSPAs are awarded to promote, recognize and reward undergraduate, graduate and doctoral students for quality research in the geophysical sciences. Typically the top 2-5% of presenters in each section are acknowledged.

Miller’s presentation was titled, “Gross Primary Productivity and Vegetation Light Use Efficiency of a Large Metropolitan Region based on CO2 Flux Measurements and WorldView-2 Satellite Imagery.”

“David leveraged rare urban CO2 flux measurements with high resolution satellite imagery and lidar. This allowed him to answer the question of whether urban land-use types differ in carbon uptake primarily due to vegetation condition (uptake per unit vegetated area) or due to differences in the amount of vegetation cover,” stated Joe McFadden, advisor to Miller and Wetherley. McFadden is a Professor of Geography at UC Santa Barbara and was one of four people convening the Urban Areas and Global Change session at the Fall Meeting.

Wetherley gave a talk titled “Evaluating Vegetation Type Effects on Land Surface Temperature at the City Scale.” She used remote sensing to create a landcover map of all of urbanized Los Angeles, and then used that map to study patterns in vegetation temperatures to enhance our understanding of urban climate and water use.

“Erin’s paper is really groundbreaking because it uses remote sensing at the scale of large metropolitan regions to separately quantify the effects of vegetation and environmental drivers on urban heat, despite the incredible heterogeneity of the city,” said McFadden.

Excerpt from https://geog.ucsb.edu/graduate-students-honored-at-american-geophysical-unions-fall-meeting/