Joshua Hrisko Takes 1st Place for Oral Presentation in AMS Urban Environment Symposium

Posted on March 12, 2020

Joshua Hrisko Takes 1^st Place for Oral Presentation in AMS, Receives Provisional Patent

The year 2020 is off to a great start for NOAA CESSRST Fellow Joshua Hrisko, a 4 ^th-year PhD candidate at City College of New York majoring in mechanical engineering.

The Manhattan resident took first place honors for best oral presentation in the 15 ^th annual Symposium on the Urban Environment at the American Meteorological Society (AMS) Annual Meeting, held January 13 - 16. In addition, he had a related paper published in February and was awarded a provisional patent for a portable, GPS-enabled, ground-truth, non-contact infrared temperature validation tool.

His AMS award-winning presentation was titled “Quantifying the Heat Stored in Urban Environments Using Remote Sensing Technology.” The research investigates how to quantify the contribution of storage heat flux to the urban surface energy budget by integrating remote sensing data with land cover and ground-based measurements.

The analysis uses the GOES-16 satellite, which has a spatial resolution of 2 km in the infrared bands and a temporal resolution of five minutes, which is meteorologically-relevant. The satellite data is coupled with high-resolution land cover and land use information to estimate the storage flux, which will be validated using ground-based measurements.

Preliminary analysis shows that the GOES-16 satellite data is reasonably correlated with ground-based sensors. Additionally, the satellite images reproduce the spatial variability reasonably well. In the next phase, satellite images will be downscaled to higher resolution and integrated with a high-resolution land cover and land use database to estimate the storage heat flux.

Mr. Hrisko is the corresponding author on a paper titled “Urban air temperature model using GOES-16 LST and a diurnal regressive neural network algorithm.” It was published in the February 2020 edition of “Remote Sensing of the Environment.”

High-resolution, multi-point, near-surface temperature information will improve LST algorithms and ultimately advance the application of satellite data to study urban climate, the application states. In turn, enhancement of satellite information improves the well-being of the general public, since it can save lives during extreme weather events such as heat waves.

Joshua’s work worthy of patenting, an application titled “GPS-Enabled Infrared Camera with Thermocouple for Real-Time Land Surface Temperature Calibration.” was submitted based on his work presented at the American Geological Union Annual Meeting held in December 2019. The pending patent describes development and testing for an Arduino-based, GPS-enabled, non-contact passive infrared temperature sensor that provides ground-truth temperature validation of the GOES-16 satellite and its LST (land surface temperature) operational product.

The application is based around work presented at the American Geological Union Annual Meeting in December 2019.

On the Internet:

List of AMS student award winners: https://ams.confex.com/ams/2020Annual/meetingapp.cgi/Index/StudentAwardWinner~1

Patent abstract: https://www.essoar.org/doi/10.1002/essoar.10501322.1

AGU poster: https://www.essoar.org/doi/pdf/10.1002/essoar.10501322.1

Article in “Remote Sensing of the Environment:” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0034425719305140?via%3Dihub