Piers Sellers NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Winner of the 2016 Nordberg Award

 
"NASA and the Land Biosphere"
  

Over the last 30 years, the business of understanding and modeling the Earth's Biosphere has evolved through a combination of unlikely collaborations, unexpected opportunities and some luck. During the early 1980’s, simple climate models were showing that global warming could be a real threat, but these models were roundly criticized for having unrealistic descriptions of the interactions between the atmosphere and the land, oceans and cryosphere. It was clear that climate models had to be hugely improved to be credible as predictive tools. The land biosphere which is the subject of this talk was not considered to be a significant factor in climate change at the time. Since then, biologists, atmospheric scientists and remote sensing scientists have combined their skills to embed realistic biosphere models into climate models, and have demonstrated that satellite data can be used to initialize, calibrate and validate them. This was done using first principles biological and physical research, large scale field experiments and global scale satellite data analyses. We can now realistically model the continental energy, water and carbon cycles, and we can study how these cycles might change with a changing climate. Progress in this new scientific area – planetary scale biology – would not have been possible without NASA.

About the Speaker

Piers Sellers is currently Deputy Director of the Sciences and Exploration Directorate and Acting Director of the Earth Sciences Division at NASA/GSFC. 

He was born and educated in the United Kingdom and moved to the U.S. in 1982 to carry out climate research at NASA/GSFC.  From 1982 to 1996, he worked on global climate problems, particularly those involving interactions between the biosphere and the atmosphere, and was involved in constructing computer models of the global climate system, satellite data interpretation and conducting large-scale field experiments in the USA, Canada, Africa, and Brazil.

He served as project scientist for the first large Earth Observing System platform, Terra, launched in 1998.

He has published over 70 papers, 30 of them as first author.  His H-index is 49.

He joined the NASA astronaut corps in 1996 and flew to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2002, 2006, and 2010, carrying out six spacewalks and working on ISS assembly tasks.

He returned to GSFC in June, 2011.

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