James Wheeler

Remote Sensing Engineer at Solenix / European Space Agency

Greater Rome Metropolitan Area

About

I specialise in biophysical parameter measurements from space-borne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) sensors, such as ALOS-PALSAR, Sentinel 1, and TerraSAR-X, with some additional expertise in optical remote sensing (mostly Sentinel-2 and Landsat sensors). I work almost entirely with open source software and programming languages, and freely available datasets for academic use. I have experience in planning and carrying out field work.

Experience

  • Remote Sensing Engineer at Solenix
    May 2022 - Present · 4 yrs 2 mos

  • Internal Research Fellow at European Space Agency - ESA
    Oct 2019 - Apr 2022 · 2 yrs 7 mos

  • University of Leicester (Leicester, United Kingdom)
    • Postdoctoral Research Associate
      Jun 2018 - Oct 2019 · 1 yr 5 mos

      I worked on several projects at the University of Leicester related to mapping landcover and biophysical parameters from Sentinel-1 SAR. I examined the relationships between soil moisture from in situ point measurements (TDR probes) and broader measurements (COSMOS sensors), and modelled from S-1 backscatter and image pair coherence.

    • GIONET Researcher and PhD Candidate
      Sep 2011 - Jun 2018 · 6 yrs 10 mos

      "Forest extent monitoring in the Congo Basin using L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR)" I focused on mapping the spatial distribution of deforestation and intact topical forest from 2007-2010

    • Research Assistant
      Apr 2016 - May 2018 · 2 yrs 2 mos

      This role for the ESA FireCCI project focused on mapping burned areas in the African continent from Sentinel-1 image pair coherence. I built a processing chain for generating and analysing high volume, wide area S-1 products on the University of Leicester HPC, ALICE.

  • Remote Sensing Researcher at Geospatial Insight Limited
    Jan 2015 - Mar 2016 · 1 yr 3 mos

  • Remote Sensing Researcher at Coastal and Marine Research Centre, UCC
    Oct 2010 - Sep 2011 · 1 yr

    Examining the use of satellite radar to measure surface movement of raised bogs in Ireland, using the technique of Differential Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (DInSAR), with data from the Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) sensor onboard the European Space Agency's Environmental Satellite (ENVISAT)