The Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-View Sensor (SeaWiFS) Team will receive the 2000 William T. Pecora Award during ceremonies on October 3, 2002 at the National Space Club’s 21st Annual Fall Reception at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
The award, sponsored jointly by the U.S. Geological Survey and NASA, recognizes the SeaWiFS Team for outstanding contributions towards understanding the Earth’s biology.
The Pecora Award has been presented annually since 1974 to honor the memory of Dr. William T. Pecora, who was a motivating force in the establishment of Earth resource sensing from space. The award recognizes outstanding contributions by individuals or groups toward the understanding of the Earth by means of remote sensing.
Pecora served as director of the U.S. Geological Survey from 1965-1971, and later served as Undersecretary, Department of the Interior, until his death in 1972. Any individual or group working in the field of remote sensing of the Earth is eligible to receive this award, which recognizes contributions leading to successful practical applications of remote sensing.
The 2000 award recognizes the team responsible for the Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-View Sensor which has been providing global views of oceanic biological activity with no interruption in service since data reception began on September 18, 1997.
The award will be presented to the NASA/ORBIMAGE team by Dr. Ghassem Asrar, NASA’s Associate Administrator for Earth Science and Barbara Ryan, Associate Director for Geography for the U.S. Geological Survey.
SeaWiFS data have allowed the first extended view of the response of global ocean ecosystems to seasonal and inter-annual variability. The mission has delivered terrestrial and atmospheric research data products that far exceed the original ocean biology applications envisioned by its developers. The rapid turnaround of data and the wide variety of data products, combined with exceptional data quality, have established a new standard for satellite mission performance.
The SeaWiFS team is a partnership between NASA and Orbital Imaging Corporation (ORBIMAGE) of Dulles, Va. Orbital Sciences Corporation (OSC) built and launched SeaSTAR/SeaWiFS with Hughes/Santa Barbara providing the instrument under an OSC subcontract. After data acceptance, in December 1997, ORBIMAGE purchased SeaSTAR, renamed it to Orbview-2 and assumed responsibility for routine operations. The SeaWiFS Project Office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center performed instrument calibration, algorithm development, product validation and routine data reception, processing and distribution.
Use of the data has been greatly expedited by extensive technical documentation and user friendly processing software provided at no cost to the research community.
SeaWiFS provided the first synoptic view of ocean ecosystem responses to a major El Nino-Southern Oscillation event. The imagery captured the collapsed ecosystem of the equatorial Pacific Ocean during the height of the 1997 El Nino warm phase. SeaWiFS also documented the rapid onset of the La Nina cold phase in May 1998 that produced the most intense phytoplankton bloom ever observed in the equatorial Pacific. The bloom covered nearly a quarter of the Earth’s circumference.
Since early in the mission, SeaWiFS data have been used to monitor terrestrial vegetation and to generate global composites of normalized difference vegetation index images. Numerous SeaWiFS images of Saharan and Asian dust outbreaks, hurricanes, fires and volcanic eruptions have been featured in the news media. Coverage of the summer 2000 fires in the western United States was especially useful to forest managers.
For information and images from the SeaWiFS instrument, go to:
