Ana.privette

Dr. Ana Pinheiro Privette is the Data Coordinator for the National Climate Assessment Program. She was born in Portugal and moved to the United States in 1997 to pursue a Master of Engineering, in Civil and Environmental Engineering, at MIT. She was awarded a PhD in Environmental Engineering from the New University of Lisbon, in 2003, after conducting her doctoral research work in the US with a fellowship from the Portuguese Ministry of Science and Technology. As a visiting scientist and doctoral student at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), she developed a 6-year satellite AVHRR Land Surface Temperature (LST) product over the African continent. She identified and characterized directional effects in LST estimates that result from no-uniformity of viewing and illumination geometries. In addition, she developed a simplified radiative transfer model (MGP) for inferring LST from structured vegetated surfaces. During that period, Ana coordinated and collected soil and vegetation temperature, and moisture measurements, in Zambia and South Africa, for a NASA's international field campaign.

In 2003, Ana held a senior programmer position with SSAI at GSFC. Under that contract, she modified and implemented the MODIS Land Surface Temperature retrieval algorithm for use in a near-real time environment (MODIS Rapid Response System) to support forest fire fighting and detection, and other time-critical applications.

In November 2003, Ana transferred from the Biospheric Sciences Branch to Goddard's Hydrological Science Branch, first as a National Research Council Postdoctoral Associate and later as a NASA Postdoc Program Fellow. She coordinated and conducted field work in New Mexico in cooperation with the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (USBR). She deployed eddy-covariance systems to validate estimates of energy and water fluxes from a land surface model (LSM). She developed a module to assimilate Land Surface Temperature data into the LSM. The resulting model provided improved estimates of evapotranspiration for USBR irrigation decision support systems.

In February 2007, she joined STG, Inc. as a science researcher at NOAA's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). In that role, she developed a methodology for generating a new global satellite Land Surface Temperature product that accounts for angular variability of the observations (AVHRR sensor).

Dr. Privette joined CICS-NC as a research associate in January, 2012 and is now part of the National Climate Assessment Technical Support Unit. Her responsibilities include designing and implementing the data management system for the NCA program. In addition, she is to ensure that the NCA process meets the highest standards of the Information Quality Act, where transparency and traceability of all data an information included in the 2013 NCA Report are high priorities.