22 Sep 2016

A longtime innovator in space-based Earth observation and a team that has paved the way for the next generation of satellite precipitation observations have been honored with the 2016 William T. Pecora Award for achievement in Earth remote sensing.
The annual award, sponsored by NASA and the Department of the Interior's U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), will be presented today in Washington.

The Pecora Award, first presented in 1974, recognizes outstanding contributions of individuals and groups toward the understanding of the Earth through remote sensing. The award honors the memory of William T. Pecora, former USGS Director and Interior Under-Secretary.
Boston University professor Curtis E. Woodcock, recipient of this year’s individual award, has dedicated his career to remote sensing education, research, and service. After joining Boston University in 1984, he co-founded the Center for Remote Sensing and served as chair of the Department of Geography for 13 years.

Woodcock made ground-breaking contributions throughout his career, including seminal work on scaling and geostatistics during the 1980s that continues to influence the way we understand remotely sensed imagery. His work on land cover mapping best practices in the 2000’s unified a scattered academic community.
Woodcock’s recent research has focused on error analysis, cloud detection, and land cover change detection in dense time series of Landsat imagery. His research through more than three decades has effectively changed our basic understanding of remote sensing science.

Woodcock has contributed to the Global Observation of Forest Cover/Land Change, the Group on Earth Observations Global Forest Observations Initiative, and the United Nations Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation programs. He has led the Landsat Science Team for nearly 10 years. He has played a key role in opening and expanding the Landsat archive, and he has provided guidance for the USGS initiative to modernize Landsat-scale global land monitoring.
The group award goes to the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) team. For more than 17 years, the team has conducted innovative precipitation science and has developed widely used applications that have greatly benefitted society. The mission, launched in 1997 and ended in 2015, was a joint endeavor between NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.

TRMM’s equatorial orbit and the sustained length of its data record, combined with the first-time use of both active and passive microwave instruments, made the mission the world's foremost satellite for the study of precipitation and associated storms and climate processes in the tropics.
The TRMM team met and exceeded their original goal of advancing our understanding of the distribution of tropical rainfall and its relation to the global water and energy cycles. In producing benchmark rainfall and lightning climatologies which have been used to improve global climate models, the team provided the key impetus for the current NASA-JAXA Global Precipitation Measurement mission.