Yun Yang, an assistant professor at Cornell University and member of the OpenET consortium and nonprofit board, works to improve monitoring of plant water use, including enhancing the estimation of evapotranspiration (ET), for farmers and water managers. 

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Q: What inspired you to join the Landsat Science Team?  

A: I use Landsat extensively in my research. Landsat is the gold standard for us because it provides the land surface temperature and also the vegetation indexes that we need for ET modeling. So when this opportunity came up, I really wanted to contribute to the Landsat community and help shape the design of future Landsat missions.

Q: With more urgency worldwide to use water wisely, how will your work with albedo and ET help society? 

A: This is a really interesting time and also a really urgent time because of increasing water stress. I’m so glad that our work, which looks at plant water use at the field scale using Landsat as a primary input, can provide critical water use information for farmers and stakeholders. They can see how much water has been used from individual fields. They can use this ET information to help determine when to start irrigation, how much to irrigate, and whether there’s any stress signal from their fields. 

Albedo is also an important part of this work because it tells us how much sunlight is reflected by the land surface and how much energy is absorbed and potentially available for ET. Together with land surface temperature and vegetation information, it helps us better understand the surface energy balance and improve our estimates of ET.

Q: How does your experience with OpenET help frame your work on the Landsat Science Team and vice versa? 

A: Through my work with OpenET, I’ve had many opportunities to interact directly with end users and stakeholders, to really understand what they want and what they need, and to learn how we can better support them. Bringing all of that information back to the Landsat Science Team, I think, can help us to better design satellite products to serve our users. At the same time, what I learn from the Landsat Science Team can help us further improve our algorithms to enhance the data quality and ultimately provide better information to our end users.

Ryan O’Shea, a lead research scientist at Science Systems and Applications Inc., will work to harmonize inland and coastal water quality monitoring, including monitoring harmful algal blooms, from the Landsat Program including to monitor harmful algal blooms.

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Q: You’ve worked on Landsat Science Team projects before, but what inspired you to join as a principal investigator, and how will it be different from your previous experience as a contributor on the 2018-2023 team?  

A: As part of the team previously, I saw the algorithms that we were developing were doing really well at monitoring these fine spatial scales and I wanted to see that work continue and was super excited about Landsat 10’s capabilities. We’re going to be able to get down to 20-meter scales so we can monitor harmful algal blooms at really fine scales and help monitor small inland water bodies as well as tributaries. So, I joined for the societal benefit.

Q: How will your planned improvements to Landsat help water quality managers take action to benefit society?  

A: There are a few different themes in our proposal, one of which is gathering a wider dataset that represents regions that aren’t in our current training dataset. Most of our current data come from North America and Europe currently, so we’re trying to reach out to other continents, including South America. We’re also making a push to add more detailed information by developing algorithms in advance of the Landsat 10 launch to get more specific information on whether there’s cyanobacteria in water bodies and improve sensor harmonization by using similar retrieval algorithms from Landsat and Sentinel (European satellites), which will allow water quality managers to have consistent observations they can work with.

Q: What would a successful term on the Landsat Science Team look like for you?  

A: Big picture, I’m hoping to advocate for aquatic applications with design decisions that help support aquatic end-users and improve stakeholder use of our online web platforms so they can take it and integrate it with their decision-making capabilities to better direct their limited resources.