Thomas Dowling

Tom is a remote sensing specialist who focuses on the environmental challenges we face today. He started in Physical Geography at Durham, before moving onto a Masters in Environmental Science at Cambridge. Since finishing a PhD in glaciology (Lund, Sweden) he has worked in commercial geospatial intelligence, before moving back into academia with a focus on the validation and application of remotely sensed data at King’s College London.

Recent work has focused on the use of land surface temperature in models of agricultural pests and disease in sub-Saharan Africa. Other projects include; operational drought monitoring in northern China, laboratory and field technique development for the measurements of emissivity, cloud gap filling in satellite data, and monitoring nitrogen cycling in pastorally grazed savannah environments. The primary tool used in all of this work is Python (with a little Fortran) on both local and high-performance computing environments, supported by QGIS and the other industry-standard GUI packages.