Professor Peter North

Professor Peter North

Personal Chair, Geography

Telephone number

+44 (0) 1792 295234
Academic Office - 242
Second Floor
Wallace Building
Singleton Campus
Available For Postgraduate Supervision

About

Professor Peter North is a member of the Geography Department at Swansea University. 

Areas Of Expertise

  • Satellite remote sensing of land and atmosphere
  • Modelling of land surface interation with the atmosphere

Career Highlights

Research

My interest is the use of global satellite remote sensing to improve understanding of climate change, forest resources and in particular the role of land/atmosphere interactions. I have developed a widely used model of light transport for the optical domain (FLIGHT), based on Monte Carlo solution of radiative transfer (North, IEEE 1996). This is used to model vegetation photosynthesis and light use efficiency, to relate satellite-measured spectra to land surface properties, and has recently been extended to model light detection and ranging (LiDAR) (North et al., 2010, Morton et al., 2014). The forcing by atmospheric aerosols is currently a key uncertainty in climate change models, and in accurate measurement of the Earth's reflectance. I have developed a method for simultaneous estimation of atmospheric aerosol loading and surface reflectance, applicable to multi-angle imaging sensors (North, 2002, Bevan et al., 2012). The method has now been operationalised for the European Space Agency instruments ATSR-2 and AATSR under the ESA Climate CHange Initiative, and is under development for application to the GMES Sentinel-3 Mission, to be launched in 2015.