NASA Postdoctoral Program - Radar Remote Sensing of Vegetation

The NASA Postdoctoral Program (NPP) offers unique research opportunities to highly-talented scientists to engage in ongoing NASA research projects at a NASA Center, NASA Headquarters, or at a NASA-affiliated research institute. These one- to three-year fellowships are competitive and are designed to advance NASA's missions in space science, Earth science, aeronautics, space operations, exploration systems, and astrobiology. This specific research opportunity focuses on radar remote sensing of vegetation, including radar scattering and ecosystem modeling. The remote sensing data is used to estimate vegetation 3D structure parameters such as height using Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (inSAR) collected by spaceborne ALOS/PALSAR and airborne UAVSAR systems. The candidate will be responsible for processing repeat pass inSAR data and implementing efficient data calibration algorithms based on heterogeneous spatial sampling of ground truth points extracted from existing Lidar (ICEsat/GLAS) and field data sets. The ecosystem models widely available in the literature will be driven using the derived vegetation parameters.