12:00 – 1:00 p.m.
Room 2325, lecture hall 2, Engineering Science Hall (bldg. 9)
A light lunch will be served at 11:30 a.m.
Professor Noel Cressie, director of the Centre for Environmental Informatics in the National Institute for Applied Statistics Research Australia (NIASRA), professor of statistics and distinguished professor at University of Wollongong, Australia.
This talk is about environmental statistics for global remote sensing of atmospheric carbon dioxide, a leading greenhouse gas. An important compartment of the carbon cycle is atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), where it (and other gases) contribute to climate change through a greenhouse effect. There are a number of CO2 observational programs where measurements are made around the globe at a small number of ground-based locations at somewhat regular time intervals. In contrast, satellite-based programs are spatially global but give up some of the temporal richness. The most recent satellite launched to measure CO2 was NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2), whose principal objective is to retrieve a geographical distribution of CO2 sources and sinks. OCO-2’s measurement of column-averaged mole fraction XCO2 is designed to achieve this through a data-assimilation procedure that is statistical at its basis. Consequently, uncertainty quantification is key, starting with the spectral radiances from an individual sounding to borrowing of strength through spatial-statistical modeling.
About Professor Cressie:
Noel Cressie is director of the Centre for Environmental Informatics in the National Institute for Applied Statistics Research Australia (NIASRA), professor of statistics and distinguished professor at the University of Wollongong, Australia. He is also an adjunct professor at the University of Missouri. Noel received his B.Sc.(Hons) from the University of Western Australia and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton University, U.S. His past appointments have been at Flinders University of South Australia, Iowa State University, and The Ohio State University. Noel has published in the areas of goodness-of-fit, statistical modeling, empirical-Bayesian and Bayesian methods, remote sensing and spatial and spatio-temporal statistics. He has authored or co-authored three books, one in 1988 on goodness-of-fit (with Tim Read), one in 1993 on spatial statistics and one in 2011 on spatio-temporal statistics (with Chris Wikle). Noel is the recipient of the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies’ 2009 R.A. Fisher Lectureship, of the Statistical Society of Australia’s 2014 Pitman Medal and of the Royal Statistical Society’s 2016 Barnett Award. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, a Fellow of the Spatial Econometrics Association and an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute.
For more information, please contact Professor Marc Genton.