Abstract

Satellite geodesy enables space-based measurements of Earth’s shape, gravity field, rotation, and their minute variations as a function of precise time, offering 1 part per billion level accuracy to detect signals including changes in sea level and mass changes, ice reservoir mass balance/glaciology, surface/groundwater hydrology, ocean circulations, solid Earth/seafloor seismic and other deformation.  An increasingly warmer Earth have been and will in the future continue to adversely impact humankind and their socioeconomic well-beings, especially in world’s coastal regions and in densely populated cities which are experiencing rapid urbanization.  Climate-induced hazards, including but not limited to, rapid sea-level rise, intensified cyclone/storm surges, prolonged floods/droughts, extreme heat/precipitations, wildfires, severe natural/anthropogenic land subsidence, and depletion of surface and groundwater freshwater resources, collectively further exacerbate risks to Earth’s inhabitants.  Geodesy and the associated Essential Climate Variables (ECVs) are postulated to be critical to enable accurate and timely monitoring of these hazards with the goal towards achieving effective climate actions.  Here, we present current achievements using contemporary satellite geodetic observations, including satellite gravimetry, altimetry, interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR), GNSS, and GNSS signals of opportunities, processed using deep-learning analytics and demonstrating adequate spatiotemporal resolutions-downscaling over selected regions, towards enabling timely climate-induced hazards monitoring and effective climate actions.

Biography

C K Shum is a Professor and Distinguished University Scholar at the Ohio State University, USA.  He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a Fellow of the International Association of Geodesy.  As a Lead Author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment, he contributed to the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, which was jointly awarded to IPCC and Al Gore, Jr. “for their efforts to understand and to counteract the man-made climate crisis”.  He received the European Geosciences Union’s 2012 Vening Meinesz Medal for his “Distinguished research in Geodesy applied to sea-level science”.  He has published over 450 journal articles, with Google Scholar citations of 24,507, Hirsch index of 71, and i-10 index of 275. His Research.com World Ranking is 984, and National Ranking is 453 in Earth Sciences.