In this second episode of This Planet’s on Fire, we hear from Dr. Steven Hamburg, Chief Scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund. Dr. Hamburg joins SSPI’s Lou Zacharilla to talk about MethaneSAT, which locates and measures methane emissions from oil and gas operations around the world with precision and at a scale never achieved, providing valuable data for making decisions on climate change.

MethaneSAT will provide regular monitoring of regions accounting for more than 80% of global oil and gas production, identifying not only the location but also quantifying the emissions rate with unprecedented precision — giving MethaneSAT the ability to monitor changes in total emissions over time. MethaneSAT will also be able to measure methane from industrial agriculture and other sources. Learn more at methanesat.org.

Dr. Steven Hamburg is Chief Scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund. In his role at EDF, Steven works to ensure that EDF’s advocacy is based on the best available science. He coordinates studies on methane emissions from the global natural gas supply chain as Chief Scientific Officer of the International Methane Studies, which is part of the Climate and Clean Air Coalition/UN Environment. He also co-chairs the Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative – a joint project of Royal Society, The World Academy of Science and EDF – and serves on the US National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine Division on Earth and Life Sciences Advisory Board as well as other university and government advisory boards.

Prior to joining EDF, Steve spent 25 years on the faculties of Brown University and the University of Kansas where he served in numerous administrative positions in addition to his teaching and research. He has served as a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and was recognized as one of the scientists contributing to the award of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. He has also been awarded the US Environmental Protection Agency Merit Award – region 1 twice. He has published more than 100 scholarly papers on biogeochemistry, climate change impacts on forests, carbon accounting and methane emissions. Steve completed his undergraduate degree at Vassar College and his MFS and PhD at Yale University in Ecosystem Ecology. He was a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University and a Bullard Fellow at Harvard University.

This podcast originally aired in October 2020 as part of the Risk, Season 1 Better Satellite World podcast series.

In this third episode of This Planet’s on Fire, we hear from Wade Barnes, co-founder and CEO of Farmers Edge; Prateep Basu, CEO of SatSure (a Better Satellite World Award recipient in 2020); and Sanjay Wagle, co-founder and Managing Director of The Lightsmith Group. Wade, Prateep and Sanjay join SSPI’s Lou Zacharilla to talk about the major risks in agriculture today, business models and innovations that use satellite-based information to transform agricultural practices and the impacts of climate change on agriculture and investment.

Wade Barnes’s roots began in rural Manitoba, where his passion for agriculture started at an early age. He has a strong drive to bridge the gap between technology and agronomy; the motivating force behind starting Farmers Edge™. Farmers Edge, based in Winnipeg, Canada, is the world’s most respected leader in digital agriculture and revolutionized modern agriculture through integrated, AI-driven technologies and a platform that supports growers around the world. Wade is a strong advocate for the industry with a desire to assist growers across the world to improve their farming practices, increase profits and create more efficient cropping systems. He is an industry leader winning Certified Crop Advisor (CCA) of the Year and is recognized as one of the foremost agronomists in Western Canada. Wade is an inspiring speaker presenting at events across Canada and globally as an expert on the impact of technology on agribusiness and particularly the utilization of Variable Rate Technology by growers, investors and industry players. Some of his speaking engagements include Master Seeders, Global AgInvesting Conferences and TedX. Wade previously appeared in another Better Satellite World podcast: The Intersection of Satellites and Agronomy.

Prateep Basu is the co-founder and CEO of SatSure AG. He co-founded SatSure in 2017 and has served first as Global Head of Strategy and Partnerships and then as CEO for the past 2.5 years. SatSure AG is a DeepTech space applications startup that provides spatial decision intelligence to banking and insurance clients around the world. Their proprietary platform SatSure SPARTA uses satellite imagery, IoT and weather data among others, analysed using various Artificial Intelligence algorithms, to generate usable data insights for banking customers to help them better manage their agriculture portfolios and reduce the non-performing assets through efficient loan recoveries, increase their lending and financial inclusion mandate by adding new customers, planning their market expansion as well as bundling insurance products to protect their portfolio from climate change effects. Prateep is also a Board Member for Nodd App. Before co-founding SatSure, he served as an analyst at Northern Sky Research and as a scientist at ISRO. Prateep is a graduate of the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology, the International Space University and Stanford University. He accepted a Better Satellite World Award on behalf of SatSure at the 2020 Better Satellite World Awards Celebration. Learn more about SatSure.

Sanjay J. Wagle is the co-founder and Managing Director of the Lightsmith Group. His investment experience includes eight years in venture capital and growth equity. He was the first Principal in the CleanTech Group at VantagePoint Capital Partners, which invested over $1 billion in 25 companies, including Tesla Motors, in sectors such as solar, storage, smart grid, green building, water and sustainable agriculture. Earlier in his career, Sanjay served as an Investment Officer at the International Finance Corporation, where he led financings of private sector power and water infrastructure projects in developing countries. He has served in senior executive roles with several sustainable tech companies and co-led the launch of a new solar business: Soligent, the largest U.S. solar distributor, and of TerraVia, a biotech company converting plant-based feedstocks into tailored, high-value food oils. Sanjay also served as a senior official in the U.S. Department of Energy during the Obama Administration, where he oversaw the implementation of $15 billion in programs for clean energy and climate. He holds degrees from Harvard University and the University of California at Berkeley. Sanjay recently appeared in the Climate Sense edition of the New York Space Business Roundtable: Satellites Boosting Sustainable Technologies.

In this fourth episode of This Planet’s on Fire, NYSA’s Joe Fargnoli and SSPI’s Lou Zacharilla host a conversation between Paul Gloyer, President of Gloyer-Taylor Labs LLC; Douglas Helmuth, Remote Sensing Scientist and Former Principal Investigator at Lockheed Martin SSC (now retired); and Sanjay Wagle, co-founder and Managing Director of The Lightsmith Group. Paul, Douglas, and Sanjay talk about what meaningful business cases can be made for sustainable technologies in space and satellite. This podcast is based on the New York Space Business Roundtable conversation conducted on January 19, 2022.

Paul Gloyer is the President of Gloyer-Taylor Laboratories in Tennessee, a position he has held since its founding in 2005. In his role, he serves as executive manager of top-level corporate strategy and provides direct supervision for Gloyer-Taylor Laboratories’ team of engineers and scientists performing cutting-edge research and development. Paul also serves as business development lead and a project manager for technical projects at the laboratories. Throughout his career at Gloyer-Taylor Laboratories, he has been a technology innovator, having developed many innovative approaches for science and technology challenges, and also has served as a combustion instability researcher and technology, component and system developer for the laboratories. Before establishing Gloyer-Taylor Laboratories, Paul served as a partner at Roxolani LLC for 12 years. He holds a Master of Science in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Tennessee Space Institute and a Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engingeering from the University of Kansas.

Douglas Helmuth is a Remote Sensing Scientist and served as Principal Investigator at Lockheed Martin SSC for many years before he retired. Throughout a long and distinguished career, he has published a variety of scientific papers in major journals and served as a guest speaker at academic and industry events.

Sanjay J. Wagle is the co-founder and Managing Director of the Lightsmith Group. His investment experience includes eight years in venture capital and growth equity. He was the first Principal in the CleanTech Group at VantagePoint Capital Partners, which invested over $1 billion in 25 companies, including Tesla Motors, in sectors such as solar, storage, smart grid, green building, water and sustainable agriculture. Earlier in his career, Sanjay served as an Investment Officer at the International Finance Corporation, where he led financings of private sector power and water infrastructure projects in developing countries. He has served in senior executive roles with several sustainable tech companies and co-led the launch of a new solar business: Soligent, the largest U.S. solar distributor, and of TerraVia, a biotech company converting plant-based feedstocks into tailored, high-value food oils. Sanjay also served as a senior official in the U.S. Department of Energy during the Obama Administration, where he oversaw the implementation of $15 billion in programs for clean energy and climate. He holds degrees from Harvard University and the University of California at Berkeley.

In this fifth episode of This Planet’s on Fire, SSPI’s Lou Zacharilla speaks with Nicole Stott, author and retired NASA astronaut. Nicole talks about her new book: Back to Earth: What Life in Space Taught Me About Our Home Planet - and Our Mission to Protect It and how when she first saw Earth from space, she realized how interconnected we are and knew she had to help protect our planetary home.

Nicole Stott is a retired NASA astronaut who performed two important missions on the International Space Station, where she served as flight engineer for Expeditions 20 and 21. She was a Mission Specialist on Space Shuttle Missions 128 and 133. Nicole began her career as a Structural Design Engineer with Pratt & Whitney. She was the first astronaut to have a picture taken with the SSPI logo from space. In 2020, she appeared in a super bowl commercial with Busy Philipps and Lilly Singh riding the first Olay rocket! You can hear more from Nicole in a previous SSPI podcast: Women Making a Better Satellite World.

In Back to Earth, Nicole imparts essential lessons in problem-solving, survival and crisis response that each of us can practice to make change. She knows we can overcome differences to address global issues, because she saw this every day on the International Space Station. Nicole shares stories from her spaceflight and insights from scientists, activists and changemakers working to solve our greatest environmental challenges. She learns about the complexities of Earth’s biodiversity from NASA engineers working to enable life in space and from scientists protecting life on Earth for future generations. Click here to learn more about Back to Earth.

In this sixth episode of This Planet’s on Fire, we hear from Dr. Joel Kimmelshue, Principal Scientist and co-founder of Land IQ, an organization that provides solutions to challenging agricultural and environmental problems throughout the world. Dr. Kimmelshue joins SSPI’s Lou Zacharilla to talk about the role of satellites in managing water and describes what it feels like for farmers to be working in drought conditions when their livelihoods depend on water.

Dr. Joel Kimmelshue is the Principal Scientist and co-founder of Land IQ, based in California. Land IQ provides solutions to challenging agricultural and environmental problems throughout the world. Using satellite data and expertise in soil science, water quality assessment and demand evaluation, Land IQ has been able to assure compliance of water management efforts and much, much more. Dr. Kimmelshue’s work has helped enable ecosystem restoration and land stabilization through science and remote sensing and geospatial analysis. Before co-founding Land IQ, he owned and served as Principal Agricultural Scientist for NewFields Agricultural & Environmental Resources, LLC for 6 years and served as Senior Technologist - Agricultural Services at CH2MHILL for 11 years. Dr. Kimmelshue received his Doctor of Philosophy, Soil and Water Science from North Carolina State University in Raleigh as well as his Master of Science, Soil and Water Sciences, and his Bachelor of Science, Soil and Crop Science from California Polytechnic Unviversity - San Luis Obispo.

In this seventh and final episode of This Planet’s on Fire, we hear from Dr. Heather Lynch, Professor of Ecology and Evolution at Stony Brook University in New York and Chris McCormick, Founder and Chairman of PlanetiQ/Global Weather & Climate Solutions. Dr. Lynch and Chris join SSPI’s Lou Zacharilla to talk about how satellites are used as tools for a range of important aspects of the climate, including weather and ecology, which are the main focus of the conversation.

Dr. Heather Lynch is a Professor and the IACS Endowed Chair of the Ecology and Evolution Department at Stony Brook University in New York. She has applied her expertise to the analysis of complex ecological data to several important issues, including patterns of survival in mammals and biodiversity patterns in dendritic ecological networks. At Stony Brook University, Dr. Lynch’s research focuses on the application of statistics to conservation biology. It revolves around a project she manages called the Antarctic Site Inventory, a large-scale vessel-based breeding bird survey program. Dr. Lynch was the leader of an expedition that surveyed, on foot for the very first time, parts of a peninsula in the antarctic where penguin colonies were spotted from satellites, as the birds were seen moving further south due to rising temperatures. Prior to Stony Brook, Dr. Lynch was an Adjunct Professor of Applied Math and Statistics at UC Santa Cruz and a Research Scientist in the Biology Department at the University Maryland. She received her A.B. in Physics from Princeton University, an A.M. in Physics from Harvard University, and a Ph.D. in Organismal and Evolutionary Biology, also from Harvard University.

Chris McCormick is the Founder and Chairman of PlanetiQ/Global Weather & Climate Solutions. He has over 3 decades of aerospace, engineering and management experience. Throughout his career, Chris has focused on the development of entirely new mission capabilities, new components, miniaturization and tightly coupled functions leading to the development of “systems on a chip” for space missions. As Chairman of PlanetiQ, Chris is responsible for payload performance and the spacecraft mission, and he works on system design for the next generation of high-performance avionics and the fourth-generation of the Pyxis receivers. Before founding PlanetiQ, Chris managed Moog Inc.’s space sector after Moog purchased Broad Reach Engineering, the company he founded and led for 15 years prior. He also served as systems engineer for the Constellation Observing System for the Meteorology, Ionosphere, and Climate Program (COSMIC), for which he performed studies and filled a number of leadership roles.

PlanetiQ is a weather tech startup founded with the mission of revolutionizing how the world receives weather data through the development of high-definition satellite-based weather forecasting and analytics. The company’s Pyxis high-definition radio occultation (HDRO) instruments are built with advanced technology from across the glob to inform the accuracy of everyday forecasts and the prediction of major global climate events, including hurricanes, tornadoes, snowstorms and more. When GPS signals interact with the Earth’s atmosphere, PlanetiQ’s proprietary satellite-borne sensors capture and analyze data in a process called radio occultation (RO). PlanetiQ is launching a constellation of 20 satellites that will provide more than 50,000 vertical profiles of the atmosphere per day for weather forecasting and climate monitoring, which is more than 20 times the amount of data provided by current technologies.