Taking the Temperature of the Earth

Taking the Temperature of the Earth: Steps towards Integrated Understanding of Variability and Change presents an integrated, collaborative approach to observing and understanding various surface temperatures from a whole-Earth perspective. The book describes the progress in improving the quality of surface temperatures across different domains of the Earth’s surface (air, land, sea, lakes and ice), assessing variability and long-term trends, and providing applications of surface temperature data to detect and better understand Earth system behavior. As cooperation is essential between scientific communities, whose focus on particular domains of Earth’s surface and on different components of the observing system help to accelerate scientific understanding and multiply the benefits for society, this book bridges the gap between domains.

Dr. Glynn Hulley is a physicist in the Carbon Cycle and Ecosystems group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Glynn's research interests are focused on the remote sensing of Earth surface properties using thermal infrared spectroscopy. He is a member of several NASA thermal infrared satellite instrument teams including MODIS, VIIRS, ECOSTRESS, ASTER, AIRS, and Landsat. A key aspect of Glynn's research is the development of new techniques to retrieve surface temperature and spectral emissivity information from thermal remotely sensed data. Algorithms and science products developed by Glynn are widely used by researchers and have been incorporated into commercial packages by NASA. Dr. Darren Ghent: is a senior research scientist at the University of Leicester and an NCEO staff member. His research interests include the retrieval, validation and exploitation of land-surface temperature (LST), both the products from Earth Observation and the simulations of land-surface models. He is the LST Validation Scientist and LST Algorithm Manager on the Sentinel-3 mission, and is responsible for maintaining LST products from the ATSR series of instruments. He is the Project Scientist on the ESA DUE GlobTemperature Project and PI on the ESA TIRI-SIM Project; and is and has been involved on numerous other ESA, EU and National projects.