SGSUP Colloquium Series: Compton Tucker, NASA/Goddard

Learn about Compton Tucker’s research involving commercial satellite data, machine learning, high performance computing, and allometric field measurements to estimate carbon content of 10 billion semi-arid trees with an uncertainty of ±20% over an area the size of Alaska and the 48 continental states combined. Results disagreed with all previous satellite studies and numerical simulation model results. Tucker’s voluminous output data required the development of a viewer for others to use our results and for verification of our tree mapping. Results appeared in the March 2023 issue of Nature.

About the speaker: 

Compton Tucker, a native of New Mexico, received his B.S. degree in 1969, a M.S in 1973, and a Ph.D. in 1975, all from Colorado State University. He came to NASA/Goddard in 1975 as a National Academy of Sciences post-doctoral fellow and became an employee of NASA in 1977.  At NASA/Goddard, Tucker has used satellite data to study the Pale Blue Dot in research areas including famine early warning, deforestation, weather-coupled diseases, terrestrial primary production, glacier extent, and semi-arid tree carbon. He was active in NASA’s Space Archaeology Program mapping ancient sites at Troy, the Granicus River Valley, and at Gordion, all in Turkey over 10 years using radar & magnetometry.  He is an adjunct professor at the University of Maryland, a consulting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, a fellow of the AGU, and a fellow of the AAAS.