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

My interest is the use of global satellite remote sensing to improve understanding of climate change, vegetation health and carbon uptake, and the role of land/atmosphere interactions. I have developed a widely used model (FLIGHT), based on Monte Carlo solution of radiative transfer (North, 1996). This is used to model vegetation photosynthesis and light use efficiency, to relate satellite-measured spectra to land surface properties, and has been extended to model light detection and ranging (LiDAR) (North et al., 2010, Morton et al., 2014), and solar induced fluorescence (Hernandez-Clemente et al 2017). The role of atmospheric aerosols such as wildfire emissions and desert dust is currently a key uncertainty in climate change, air quality, and measurement of the Earth's reflectance. I have developed a method for estimation of atmospheric aerosol loading and surface reflectance (North, 2002, Bevan et al., 2012, Vogel et al 2022). This has been operationalised to provide a long-term global record using the European Space Agency instruments ATSR-2 and AATSR (1995-2012), and continuously updated for the Copernicus Sentinel-3 missions (2016-current). The research is funded under the ESA Climate Change Initiative, and UK NERC Earth Observation Climate Information Service (EOCIS) to provide information for international climate forecast agencies.

Areas Of Expertise

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