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Head of the Hydrological Sciences Branch at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
Dr. Christa D. Peters-Lidard graduated summa cum laude with a B.S. in Geophysics and a minor in Mathematics from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) in 1991. She then went on to earn her M.A. and Ph.D. from the Water Resources Program in the Department of Civil Engineering and Operations Research at Princeton University in 1993 and 1997, respectively. Dr. Peters-Lidard was an Assistant Professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology from 1997 to 2001. She is currently the Head of the Hydrological Sciences Branch at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, where she has been a Physical Scientist since 2001. She has served as an Editor for the American Meteorological Society Journal of Hydrometeorology (2004-2007) and an Associate Editor for Water Resources Research (2002-2004). Her research interests include land-atmosphere interactions, soil moisture measurement and modeling, and the application of high performance computing and communications technologies in Earth system modeling, for which her Land Information System team was awarded the 2005 NASA Software of the Year Award. She is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and was awarded the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) Scientific Commission A Zeldovich Medal in 2004 and the Arthur S. Flemming Award in 2007.
Her primary research objectives are
- Measurement of water and energy fluxes via field experiments and remote sensing;
- Modeling land-atmosphere interactions using coupled hydrological models; and
- Understanding the space-time structure of precipitation, evapotranspiration and soil moisture.
Thus, her work focuses on measurement and modeling of terrestrial water and energy balances and fluxes due to land-atmosphere interactions over a range of temporal and spatial scales. This research encompasses the areas of micrometeorology, boundary layer meteorology, field experiments, hillslope hydrology, hydrometeorology, numerical modeling, spatial data analysis, and remote sensing. High performance computing technologies are making simulation of these complex cross-media problems tractable. The modeling activities are complemented by participation in multisensor field experiments such as SGP97 which provide the critical data for improving our process representations. Remote sensing provides spatial data to estimate land surface model forcings and hydrologic and energetic states of the terrestrial system. Improved understanding of the physical processes that control the water and energy cycles at the land surface is central to improvements in weather prediction, understanding climatic variability and ultimately in the management of water resources.
Last update: Sat, Mar 21, 2009 |
