Bryan A. Baum
Associate Scientist
Space Science and Engineering Center
University of Wisconsin-Madison
1225 West Dayton St.
Madison, WI 53706
Phone: (608) 263-3898
Fax: (608) 262-5974
Email: bryan.baum at ssec.wisc.edu
My primary research involves regional and global cloud property retrieval from various polar-orbiting and geostationary satellite sensors. For the most part, my time goes towards data analysis with some associated coding, cal/val activities, reading/writing research articles, and proposal preparation and evaluation. I work closely with the MODIS, GOES-R, and NPP (NPOESS Preparatory Project) teams in various Principal Investigator or Co-Investigator roles. Additionally, I have the privilege of being an editor for the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology.
As time permits, I get involved with other interesting projects, e.g., global fire and smoke detection, artificial intelligence approaches to imagery discrimination problems, involvement with conference committee activities, various educational outreach projects, and serving on the occasional panel. I taught a few graduate courses on atmospheric remote sensing and cloud physics in the past, but have no teaching duties in my current position (wish I did...).
In the larger picture, the Space Science and Engineering Center (SSEC) has a wealth of talent in the atmospheric remote sensing area. Since the environment is conducive to collaboration, we take advantage of opportunities to work together on projects where possible. This is an extremely active group of researchers; the challenge is to keep up with them. If a research problem comes up, chances are good that one of us will have seen something similar before.
I am quite fortunate to have long-term collaborations (and friendships) with Ping Yang (Texas A&M), Andy Heymsfield (NCAR), members of the MODIS science team, and many more. In recent years, I have collaborated with some incredible scientists throughout the world.
It does not get much better than this.
Below are some links that provide more detailed information about my work.
Ice Cloud Bulk Scattering/Absorption Models
Note (posted August, 2008): we are in the process of updating our ice models to incorporate several years of improvements, including a new treatment for surface roughening on the ice particles, the addition of hollow bullet rosettes, other improvements in the ice light scattering models, a wealth of new microphysical data from ice clouds (subvisual cirrus, tropical data, recent field campaigns, etc.), and much more. Additionally, models will now be prepared for the entire series of AVHRR imagers as well as for many more geostationary imagers than are available currently on our web site. If you would like to be notified when there are new models, or want me to include a specific imager or sensor, please send me an email.