Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, February 14, 2005 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

Walter H. F. Smith

"Satellite altimetry, tsunamis, and bathymetry from space"

ABSTRACT -- The talk will highlight satellite altimetry in two events of current interest, the December 26 tsunami and the January 8 wreck of the USS San Francisco nuclear submarine. It will discuss the need for improved bathymetry worldwide in order to model ocean phenomena such as tsunami propagation, tidal energy dissipation, ocean circulation and mixing, and climatic heat transport. The reconnaissance of global bathymetry from space using satellite altimetry will be reviewed, with assessment of the resolution of present data and a consideration of the possibilities for a future mission.

SPEAKER -- Walter H F Smith has been a Geophysicist in NOAA's Laboratory for Satellite Altimetry (formerly Geosciences Laboratory) since 1992. Prior to joining NOAA he was Cecil and Ida Green Scholar at the Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics, Scripps Institution of Oceanography. He earned his PhD in the Gravity Department at the Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory of Columbia University in 1990, where he studied the geophysics of seamounts in the Pacific Ocean basin. He has been co-chief scientist on oceanographic expeditions across the Pacific and was Prinicipal Investigator on the "ABYSS" Pathfinder mission proposal to map the ocean floor from space. His research making space-based reconnaissance of ocean floor topography a practical reality won a Gold Medal from the Dept of Commerce in 1995 and has been featured on the covers of the journals "Science" and "Oceanography". He is the co-author of ""GMT", a free toolkit of C/Unix routines for data analysis and cartography.