ESI scientist Dr. Anin Puthukkudy awarded UMBC CIDER grant

Wed, 29 Jan 2025 15:43:38 -0500
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Dr. Anin Puthukkudy, research scientist at ESI, was recently awarded the competitive Center and Institute Departmentally-Engaged Research (CIDER) grant from the UMBC Division of Research and Creative Achievement. The CIDER grant supports collaboration between degree-granting departments and researchers affiliated with a UMBC-based center.

Dr. Puthukkudy proposed to use new AI techniques to infer information about aerosol and Earth’s surface from satellite data. His study will use the data record from ESI’s HARP2 instrument, a multi-angle imaging polarimeter on the NASA Plankton Aerosol Cloud ocean Ecosystem (PACE) satellite. Dr. Puthukkudy will also supervise an undergraduate student in the development and training of the neural networks, in conjunction with satellite data processing and atmospheric modeling. This work is a collaboration with Dr. J. Vanderlei Martins, professor of Physics at UMBC and director of the ESI, and ESI research scientists Dr. Xiaoguang Xu and Dr. Brent McBride.

Congratulations, Dr. Puthukkudy!

Photo: Global aerosol retrievals using the GRASP algorithm on PACE-HARP2 data show a variety of aerosol source and transport pathways. HARP2 measurements contain enough information to differentiate aerosol size, shape, and type from space. (Photo Credit: A. Puthukkudy/ESI)