ABSTRACT

"Terrestrial Glitter"

Satellite images of Earth are now a part of our daily life. Although such images are created mostly by diffusely (multiply) scattered light, in this talk I will focus on specularly (singly) scattered light, glint for short. While human brain is excellent at spotting single scattering contribution because of color patterns such as rainbows and optical glories, glints are discerned via intensity alone. In this talk, I will discuss distant terrestrial glitter: a variety of glints from ice clouds and water surfaces as detected by the EPIC camera onboard the DSCOVR spacecraft a million miles from the Earth, orbiting about the first Lagrangian point.

About the Speaker:

Alexander (Alex) Kostinski received B.S. in mathematics from Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1978, Ph.D. in physics from University of Illinois, Chicago in 1985. After a postdoc in electrical engineering, he joined Michigan Technological University department of physics in 1989 where he is now a Professor of Physics. His publications have ranged broadly from statistical physics, optics, fluid mechanics and astrophysics to radar meteorology, atmospheric science and signal analysis. He has taught most of the graduate and senior undergraduate courses offered by the MTU Physics department.