The 2023 Earth Science Technology Forum (ESTF2023) was held June 20-22 in Pasadena, CA, drawing attendees from industry, academia, and government.

Hosted by the NASA Earth Science Technology Office (ESTO), this annual event showcased the wide array of technology research and development related to NASA’s Earth science endeavors, including remote sensing instruments, platforms, components, advanced information systems, sensor web technologies, communications, automation, and modeling. ESTF2023 promoted collaboration and networking among technologists, scientists, and mission planners and facilitated a more complete understanding of Earth science technology needs.

LOCATION

The Beckman Institute
California Institute of Technology
1200 E. California Blvd.

ESTF2023 Proceedings

Tuesday, June 20 – Day One

12:00 Doors Open / Sign In

13:00 Opening Remarks: Michael Seablom, Interim Associate Director

Session 1: Digital Twins

Session Moderator: Ben Smith
13:30 Craig Pelissier An AI-first Open-Science Framework to Assemble Coupled Earth Systems Models and Build the TERRAHydro Terrestrial Digital Twin 
13:45  Thomas Huang Professional Open-Source Framework for Earth System Digital Twins and Applications (
14:00 Mohammad Pourhomayoun Creating a City Global Digital Twin for Transportation and Air Quality 
14:15 Thomas Allen A Digital Twin for Coastal Flood Hazards: Earth Observation, Sensors, and Model Integration 

14:30 Break

Session 2: Earth Radiation Balance

Session Moderator: Amber Emory
14:45 Kory Priestly (Anum Ashraf) DEMETER: DEMonstrating the Emerging Technology for Measuring the Earth’s Radiation
15:00  Odele Coddington The Compact Total Irradiance Monitor: Results from the first year of on-orbit operations
15:15 Odele Coddington The BABAR-ERI Instrument: Benefits, Applicability, and Readiness for Earth science

15:30 Break

Session 3: Snow and Soil Moisture

Session Moderator: Sachi Babu
15:45 Adrian Tang Ku-Band Enhanced MetaSurface Radar with CMOS System-on-Chip Radar Using Hardware Machine Learning for Enhanced Remote Snowpack Sensing 
16:00 Suresh Vannan (Luisa Vieira Lucchese) A Hosted Analytic Collaborative Framework for Global River Water Quantity and Quality from SWOT, Landsat, and Sentinel-2
16:15 James Garrison / Rashmi Shah Signals Of Opportunty P-Band Investigation (SNOOPI): Preparations For Launch 
16:30 Darmindra Arumugam Quantum Rydberg Radar for Surface, Topography and Vegetation
16:45  Mark Bailey Large Aperture Rotating Meta-Material Lens Antenna for Global L-band Observatory for Water Cycle Studies (GLOWS)
17:00 Simon Yueh P-band Signals of Opportunity Synthetic Aperture Radar Snow Mission Concept with A Multi-Element Antenna Array for the NASA Earth System Explorer Program
17:15 Paul Siqueira SNOWWI: A three frequency interferometric SAR for Snow Science applications 

17:30 Day 1 Adjourn

Wednesday, June 21 – Day Two

Session 4: Surface Deformation & Change and Gravity

Session Moderator: Valerie Scott
08:45 Brian Pollard HALE InSAR for Continuous and Precise Measurement of Earth’s Changing Surface: Year 1 Status 
09:00 James C. Mason Volcano Monitoring Using Commercial Satellites and Open Data
09:15 Yunling Lou A Flexible Configuration Distributed Synthetic Aperture Digital Beamforming Radar (FlexDSAR)
09:30 Zhen Liu (Angelyn Moore) Ground GNSS Disaster Monitoring, Crustal Deformation, Extreme Weather & Other Applications: Community-ready Products and Technology Advancement
09:45 John W. Conklin A Simplified Gravitational Reference Sensor for Future Geodesy Missions 

10:00 Break

Session 5: Wildfire Technology

Session Moderator: Michael Falkowski
10:15 Introduction to FireSense (pdf): Michael Falkowski, Program Manager, NASA Applied Sciences Wildland Fire Program, FireSense Project Lead (video)
10:35 Sarath Gunapala Compact fire infrared radiance spectral tracker (c-FIRST) for Earth Remote Sensing Instruments 
10:50  Ata Akbari Asanjan Image-to-Image Wildfire Detection via Quantum-Compatible Variational Segmentation from Remotely-sensed Data 
11:05 Vinay Ravindra Distributed Spacecraft with Heuristic Intelligence to Enable Logistical Decisions for Global Navigation Satellite System Reflectometry (GNSS-R) of Wildfires 
11:20 Milt Halem Towards an AI Satellite Informed Global Boreal Wildfire Digital Twin
11:35 Discussion and Q&A

12:00 Lunch

Session 6: New Observing Strategies

Session Moderator: Nikunj Oza
13:30 Emily Dunkel Benchmarking Deep Learning, Instrument Processing, and Mission Planning Applications on Edge Processors onboard the ISS
13:45  Alberto Candela Dynamic Targeting to Improve Earth Science Missions
14:00 Paul Grogan Tailoring the New Observing Strategies Testbed to Earth Science Test Cases 

14:15 Break

Session 7: Surface Biology & Geology

Session Moderator: Sachi Babu
14:30 Tomasz Tkaczyk Fiber based – VIS and SWIR Snapshot Spectrometers 
14:45 S. J. Ben Yoo Ultrahigh Resolution Hyperspectral Compressive Imaging Systems with 3D Photonic Integrated Circuits and their applications in Green House Gas Concentration Estimation
15:00 David Z Ting Anitmonide Unipolar Barrier Infrared Detectors for Earth Science Applications 
15:15 Jeffery J Puschell Advanced Technology Land Imaging Spectroradiometer-Prototype (ATLIS-P) Advanced Technology Demonstration
15:30 Jeffery J Puschell Improved Radiometric calibration of Imaging Systems (IRIS) for next generation small satellite imagers

15:45 Break

Session 8: Biology, Vegetation & Ecosystems

Session Moderator: Haris Riris
16:00 Brian Pollard Embedded PNT Module for Distributed Radar Sensing: Year 1 Status
16:15 Seungwon Lee Ecological Projection Analytic Collaborative Framework
16:30 Jon Ranson (David Harding) Development and Demonstration of the Concurrent Artificially-intelligent Spectrometry and Adaptive Lidar System

17:00 ‘Ask Us Anything’ Forum with Michael Seablom, Interim Associate Director

17:30/18:00 Day 2 Adjourn

Thursday June 22 – Day 3

Session 9: Atmospheric Gases

Session Moderator: Bob Connerton
08:30 Christopher Ball Development of Bandstructure Engineered Type-II Superlattice Antimonide Avalanche Photodiodes (BETA-APD) to Support Short-Wavelength Infrared Lidar Instruments 
08:45 Nathaniel Livesey The Continuity Microwave Limb Sounder (C-MLS) – Capitalizing on New Technology to Continue the MLS Record of Daily Global Middle Atmosphere Composition Observations 
09:00 Daniel Korwan The GFCR (Gas Filter Correlation Radiometer) for Limb Occultation demo for upper atmosphere Temperature (GLOTemp)
09:15 Mohammad Pourhomayoun Predicting What We Breathe: Applying Deep Learning to Multi Source Big Data for Urban Air Quality Prediction
09:30 Charles Swenson (Lucas Anderson) A high-performance CubeSat bus to support the ACMES Mission 
09:45 Griffin Mead Accurate Greenhouse Gas Remote Sensing using Open-path Dual-comb Spectroscopy 
10:00 William H. Swartz CHAPS-D: The Compact Hyperspectral Air Pollution Sensor – Demonstrator 
10:15 Meghan Chandarana Intelligent Long Endurance Observing System (ILEOS) 

10:30 Break

Session 10: Weather

Session Moderator: Eastwood Im
10:45 Kevin Maschhoff SToRM SAR, A Multi-Static Precipitation Radar Hosted by Micro-Satellites: an Update on Ground-Based Field Test Results and Airborne Demonstration Plans
11:00 Sonja Behnke CubeSpark: 3-D lightning mapping using a constellation of CubeSats 
11:15 Caleb Dobias Photonic Lantern Lidar Receivers
11:30 Matthew L Walker McLinden Status of the Microwave Barometric Radar and Sounder (MBARS)
11:45 Ken Cooper Deployment of a 170 GHz Differential Absorption Radar in Winter Nor’easters and California Beaches 

12:00 Lunch

Session 11: Planetary Boundary Layer

Session Moderator: Bob Bauer
13:30 William Blackwell Configurable Reflectarray for Electronic Wideband Scanning Radiometry (CREWSR)
13:45 Steven C. Reising Miniaturized Microwave Absolute Calibration (MiniMAC) for Atmospheric Remote Sensing from Small Satellites 
14:00 Rachael Kroodsma Hyperspectral Microwave Sounder Airborne Capability at 50 and 183 GHz for CoSMIR-H
14:15 Antonia Gambacorta Advancing Atmospheric Thermodynamic Sounding From Space Using Hyperspectral Microwave Measurements: Introducing the Hyperspectral Microwave Photonic Instrument (HYMPI) 
14:30 Chi Ao PBL Profiling with Active Microwave Crosslink Occultations 

14:45 Break

Session 12: Aerosols, Clouds, Convection, and Precipitation

Session Moderator: Amber Emory
15:00 William Deal Progress on IRAST/YTHP
15:15 Raquel Rodriguez Monje CloudCube: A Multi-frequency Solid-State Radar for Affordable Cloud and Precipitation Observations from Space 
15:30 Lute Maleki Development of a Multi-band Radar on a Photonic Integrated Circuit (PIC)
15:45 Ben Gorr 3D-CHESS: Decentralized, dynamic, distributed, context-aware heterogeneous sensor systems—Preliminary results 
16:00 Razi Ahmed RF-photonics W-band receiver for cloud sensing applications 
16:15 Akim A. Babenko SMart Ice Cloud Sensing with a SmallSat Active/Passive Terahertz Instrument 
16:30 Matthew DeLand Stratospheric Aerosol Measurements From a Compact Satellite Instrument 
16:45 Jouni Susiluoto Easing Computational Burden in Science Analyses with Kernel Flows-based Emulators 

17:00 Day 3 Adjourn