Rupesh Shrestha

Bio

I am a research staff member at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), working at NASA's Distributed Active Archive Center (DAAC). I have an extensive background in remote sensing applied to vegetation measurements, cyber-infrastructure development, and data science. I have led the development of several tools, algorithms, and data services that enable the estimation of earth science observables from satellite, airborne, and ground-based remote sensing. At the ORNL DAAC, I lead NASA's MODIS/VIIRS subsetting platform and a soil moisture data platform. I am also the science lead for the publication of NASA's Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) mission higher-level data products, including forest structure and aboveground biomass datasets, at the ORNL DAAC. I have a Ph.D. from Virginia Tech and M.S. in Photogrammetry and Geoinformatics from Stuttgart, Germany. I also serve as an adjunct faculty in the Department of Forestry, Wildlife & Fisheries at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. I am also a member of the Applied Earth Observations Innovation Partnership (AEOIP) between NASA & USDA Forest Service, ASPRS's LASer (LAS) Specification Committee, and the NEON Airborne Remote Sensing Algorithm Design Technical Working Group. I am a senior member of IEEE and a member of AGU, ASPRS, and ESA.

Projects

• NASA's ORNL Distributed Active Archive Center (https://daac.ornl.gov/)
• NASA's Atmospheric Carbon and Transport (ACT)-America mission (https://www-air.larc.nasa.gov/missions/ACT-America/)
• North American Carbon Program: Multi-scale Synthesis and Terrestrial Model Intercomparison Project - MsTMIP (https://nacp.ornl.gov)
• Next Generation Ecosystem Experiments - Arctic (NGEE Arctic; http://ngee-arctic.ornl.gov/)