FRM4FIRE Project Team

Dr. Bernardo Mota
Project Lead
National Physical Laboratory

Bernardo Mota is a senior research scientist in the Climate and Earth Observation group at NPL, Teddington, UK, where he has worked since 2020.

After completing a PhD in Forestry at the University of Lisbon, he joined King's College London and the Joint Research Centre in developing approaches to retrieve biomass burning emissions from EO data and a framework to assess the quality of EO based fire products.

At NPL, Bernardo leads the group’s activity around quality assurance of fire products, and development approaches based on metrological methods to characterise the uncertainty and validate fire products retrieved from satellite Earth Observation (EO) data. He currently leads the CEOS Land Product Validation fire sub-group.

Prof. Martin Wooster, King’s College London, Co-Project lead

Martin Wooster, is an environmental physicist and Earth Observation (EO) scientist with more than 30-years’ experience. He specialises in infrared remote sensing and applications.

Previously he was a DfID Scientific Civil Servant delivering practical applications of satellite remote sensing to support management of the environment and natural resources and the impact mitigation of natural hazards in less economically developed nations. He is Professor of Earth Observation Science at King’s College London and a Director within NERC’s National Centre for Earth Observation (NCEO) and the Leverhulme Centre for Wildfires, Environment and Society.

Experienced in scientific project management, team leadership, grant proposal preparation, delivery of field campaigns, training courses, EO product validation and algorithms development to support operational EO products. Professor Wooster has almost 13,000 citations to his published work, and an H-index of 58. He co-leads the international GOFC-GOLD Fire implementation team, which works to link space agencies, fire product developers and users to ensure the quality, consistency, usability and sustainability of satellite fire products and future fire-focused EO missions.

Farrer Owsley-Brown, Project scientist, KCL

Farrer Owsley-Brown is a PhD student at King’s College London, supervised by Prof Martin Wooster. Before joining King’s in 2020, he completed an MSc at UCL and a BSc at Durham University, and worked in cyber security.

He is completing a PhD that is focused on developing techniques to identify flaming from smouldering landscape fires, which will improve emissions estimates. He acted as ‘Science Lead’ on a recent airborne field campaign, the Evaluation and Validation of Sentinel-3 Active Fire Detection and FRP Products Experiment (FIDEX), which was funded by ESA. In this role he worked with technical staff to ensure that the science objectives were met, as well as processing and analysing data collected.

Dr Gareth Roberts, Work package leader, University of Southampton

Gareth Roberts is a lecturer in the School of Geography and Environmental Science at the University of Southampton specialising in environmental remote sensing.

His research interests address the measurement and monitoring of land surface dynamics using optical and thermal remote sensing methods. The latter has focused on improving understanding of fire in the natural environment and on the utilisation of satellite observations to address key questions about effects of fires and their impacts.

Dr. Roberts has developed algorithms to detect landscape fires using geostationary which has been implemented operationally by EUMETSAT. These data have been used to parameterise atmospheric transport models for air quality forecasting which have subsequently been used to quantify the impact of landscape fire emissions on air quality and human health.

Dr Roberts is author or co-author of over 45 peer-reviewed journal publications on this work, and two book chapters.