Tamlin M. Pavelsky

About

Tamlin M. Pavelsky is a Kenan Distinguished Professor in the Department of Earth, Marine and Environmental Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research interests focus on the intersections between hydrology, satellite remote sensing, and climate change. He works on scales ranging from the entire globe to a single large wetland, with a particular emphasis on Arctic and Subarctic regions. His current projects aim to understand how satellite remote sensing can be used to analyze the storage, movement, and quality of surface water, assess the accuracy of regional climate models in simulating hydrologic processes, and investigate the impacts of human-created warming on Arctic and boreal hydrologic and climatic systems. A significant part of his research involves the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite mission and its applications to rivers, lakes, and wetlands.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Environmental science
• Geography
• Ecology
• Remote sensing
• Geology
• Cartography
• Biology
• Climatology
• Physical geography

Selected publications

• River ecosystem metabolism and carbon biogeochemistry in a changing world

  Nature · 2023 · 514 citations

  DOI

• Research Trends in the Use of Remote Sensing for Inland Water Quality Science: Moving Towards Multidisciplinary Applications

  Water · 2020 · 310 citations

  Remote sensing approaches to measuring inland water quality date back nearly 50 years to the beginning of the satellite era. Over this time span, hundreds of peer-reviewed publications have demonstrated promising remote sensing models to estimate biological, chemical, and physical properties of inland waterbodies. Until recently, most of these publications focused largely on algorithm development as opposed to implementation of those algorithms to address specific science questions. This slow ev…

  DOI

• Altimetry for the future: Building on 25 years of progress

  Advances in Space Research · 2021 · 295 citations

  In 2018 we celebrated 25 years of development of radar altimetry, and the progress achieved by this methodology in the fields of global and coastal oceanography, hydrology, geodesy and cryospheric sciences. Many symbolic major events have celebrated these developments, e.g., in Venice, Italy, the 15th (2006) and 20th (2012) years of progress and more recently, in 2018, in Ponta Delgada, Portugal, 25 Years of Progress in Radar Altimetry. On this latter occasion it was decided to collect contribut…

  DOI

• The past and future of global river ice

  Nature · 2020 · 210 citations

  DOI

• The Color of Rivers

  Geophysical Research Letters · 2020 · 108 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Abstract Rivers are among the most imperiled ecosystems globally, yet we do not have broad‐scale understanding of their changing ecology because most are rarely sampled. Water color, as perceived by the human eye, is an integrative measure of water quality directly observed by satellites. We examined patterns in river color between 1984 and 2018 by building a remote sensing database of surface reflectance, RiverSR, extracted from 234,727 Landsat images covering 108,000 kilometers of rivers >…

  DOI

Recent grants

• NNA Track 1: Collaborative Research: Navigating Convergent Pressures on Arctic Development

  NSF · $191k · 2020–2025

Frequent coauthors

• George H. Allen

  107 shared

• Xiao Yang

  Southern Methodist University

  101 shared

• Michael Durand

  100 shared

• L. C. Smith

  Providence College

  91 shared

• C. J. Gleason

  University of Massachusetts Amherst

  80 shared

• L. H. Pitcher

  Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education

  61 shared

• Wayana Dolan

  Denver Federal Center

  50 shared

• Theodore Langhorst

  University of Massachusetts Amherst

  47 shared

Similar researchers at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

• Chao Wangh-113
• Xiaoming Liuh-83
• Christopher Martensh-61