John Galantowicz, PhD, Principal Scientist, and Leader of Land Surface Remote Sensing
Dr. Galantowicz has worked for over 25 years in remote sensing algorithm conception, design, and operational implementation. Since joining AER in 1997, he has developed and tested algorithms for land, ice, and atmospheric parameter retrievals including soil moisture, surface water, vegetation water, land cover, surface temperature, sea ice, snow, and atmospheric vertical temperature and moisture profiles. He has worked with data from passive microwave, optical, and synthetic aperture radar sensors. He was the lead investigator for land and ice algorithms for the Conical Scanning Microwave Imager/Sounder (CMIS) for the National Polar Orbiting Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) and algorithm lead for soil moisture and snow water equivalent retrievals for the Weather Satellite Follow-on – Microwave (WSF-M) satellite sensor program. He is a co-developer of the AER Respond Service for Tornadoes and Wildfires, a service to deliver rapid analyses of hazard impacts using remotely sensed data from, e.g., the MODIS, Landsat, and Maxar Worldview instruments. He has led several NASA-funded projects to improve and assess methods for downscaling passive microwave inundation area estimates to produce higher-resolution (~90-m) flood extent products. In 2015, he led development of a historical and near-real time flood mapping system tailored to the African Risk Capacity's sovereign risk transfer program. In 2016, his team released the AER FloodScan flood mapping data service and interactive web interface (https://floodscan.aer.com), which has been in continuous near-real time operation since then. He is an active member of the Global Flood Partnership, contributing FloodScan maps in response to major disasters including Cyclone Idai in 2019 and Hurricane Eta in 2020. Dr. Galantowicz holds a B.S.E. degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Princeton University and an M.S.E. degree in electrical engineering and a Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering and atmospheric, oceanic, and space science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.