Christopher Ruf

Director, Space Physics Research Laboratory
Professor, Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences
Professor, Electrical Engineering

Education:

Ph.D., Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
B.A., Physics, Reed College

Research:

Earth and Planetary Remote Sensing

Doctoral Students:

Boon Lim
Sidharth Misra
Shannon Curry
David Fenigstein
Rachael Kroodsma
Amanda Mims

Specializations and Research Interests

• Earth Environmental Remote Sensing:
  • Design and fabrication of next-generation satellite microwave radiometers
  • Novel methods for maintaining high accuracy and stability calibration of satellite sensors to detect minute global change signatures
  • Application of inversion techniques and multi-sensor assimilation to remote sensing
  •  Hardware and algorithmic aspects of satellite microwave radiometry
• Synthetic thinned aperture radiometry
• Mitigation of radio frequency interference
• Self-contained end-to-end radiometer calibration system
• Use of stationary statistical properties of upwelling radiances to constrain absolute accuracy and long term stability of satellite measurements
• Profiling of lower, middle and upper atmosphere using multispectral, multisensor and climatological databases

Honors, Awards and Accomplishments

• 2006 International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium Prize Paper Award for Detection of RFI by its Amplitude Probability Distribution
• Instrument Scientist, NASA TOPEX Microwave Radiometer
• Principle Investigator, calibration/validation of US Navy GEOSAT Follow-On Water Vapor Radiometer
• Science Team Member, NASA Jason-1 Microwave Radiometer
• Science Team Member, NASA Aquarius Microwave Radiometer
• Developed new method for estimating the depth of the marine boundary layer (BLD) from space using horizontal turbulence structure of vertically integrated atmospheric water vapor
• Developed new method for absolute and relative calibration of spaceborne microwave radiometers using lower bound on a cumulative statistic of the measured radiance
• Pushed several technologies needed to fly synthetic thinned aperture radiometer (STAR) in space (antenna arrays, real/synthetic aperture sharing, digital correlators, calibration techniques)
• Derived correction to standard model for pressure broadening of atmospheric absorption line of water vapor at 22.235 GHz based on microwave spectrometer observations
• Fellow, IEEE
• IEEE Judith A. Resnik Technical Field Award, Contributions to the absolute calibration of spaceborne microwave radiometers
• IEEE Transactions on Geoscience & Remote Sensing Prize Paper Award, Retrieval of tropospheric water vapor scale height from horizontal turbulence
• NASA Group Achievement Award, Lightweight Rainfall Radiometer
• NASA Group Achievement Award, TOPEX Joint Verification Team
• NASA Group Achievement Award, TOPEX precision orbit determination
• NASA Group Achievement Award, TOPEX Microwave Radiometer
• NASA Certificate of Recognition, Piezoelectric reflecting array for reflector surface distortion compensation
• NASA Certificate of Recognition, Synthetic aperture interferometric radiometer image reconstruction error analysis
• NASA Certificate of Recognition, Sparse aperture interferometric radiometer - Refining the two-dimensional antenna configuration

Professional Service

• Editor in Chief, IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing 
• Member, URSI Commission F (Remote Sensing)
• Former Member, National Academies Committee on Radio Frequency
• Former Associate Editor, AGU Radio Science
• Former Guest Editor, IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing
• Former Guest Editor, AGU Radio Science
• Former Associate Editor, AMS Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology
• Former Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing
• Former Editor, IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society Newsletter

Publications

http://ktb.engin.umich.edu/RSG/pubs.htm