(Full Color) The Color of the Atmosphere with the Ocean Below is a comprehensive history of NASA's "ocean color" missions. Written by James Acker with funding from the NASA Science and History Divisions, this book covers the science, technology, and diverse scientific personalities that allowed NASA to successfully extract measurements of light from the ocean surface using satellite instruments. These data allowed observation and determination of the complex patterns of biological activity in the oceans, which are directly related to mankind's understanding and utilization of the oceans. This research has also helped define the role that oceans play in local and regional ecosystems, as well in the changing global climate system. The history is extensively footnoted and referenced, providing unique documentation of this successful sector of NASA's Earth science missions. It covers a broad range of oceanographic research to which these vital data have been applied, and explains many scientific aspects. The history was augmented by individual and group interviews of scientists and engineers involved in NASA's three primary ocean color missions. The interviews and documents describe how diligent efforts and collaborations of oceanographers, physicists, satellite and sensor technicians, computer programmers, government agencies, and private companies combined to surmount remarkable challenges both at sea and in space to make this critical oceanographic data accurate and useful. Augmented with anecdotal insights into the missions - what made them work, and the different pitfalls and surprises frequently imperiling their eventual success - the book presents a detailed history of NASA's leading contribution to the observations of ocean color from space. It will both inform and entertain readers interested in science, oceanography, and remote sensing of the Earth.
About the Author: James Acker grew up in Des Plaines, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. He gained a love of both science and the water from his parents; his father Robert was a chemical engineer, sailor, and swimmer, and his mother Julie was a singer and socialite who grew up in the coastal town of Winthrop, Massachusetts. He initially became fascinated by volcanoes and the ocean by reading his father's back issues of National Geographic. He attended Maine West High School and then Lawrence University in Wisconsin, where he majored in chemistry. Though he had wished for a career in oceanography, he had decided on a career path in analytical chemistry until he met with Lawrence alumnus Peter Betzer, an oceanographer at the University of South Florida. Betzer convinced him that he could be a chemical oceanographer, which led him to grad school at the USF Department of Marine Science. Unter the tutelage of Betzer and Robert Byrne, he did research on the dissolution of biogenic carbonates in the deep ocean (which provided opportunities to visit three far-flung "K" islands on research cruises: Kwajalein, Kodiak, and Kerguelen). Answering an advertisement for the position of Earth Observing System Oceanographic Liaison brought him to NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. In this position, he met many of the oceanographic scientists who would be part of the SeaWiFS and MODIS mission teams. He worked directly with the SeaWiFS Project on their Technical Memorandum series, authoring a retrospective on the CZCS NET. Then he joined the Goddard Distributed Active Archive Center (DAAC) to conduct user services for SeaWiFS data. In this position he became acquainted with numerous ocean color scientists around the world, and maintained close contact with the SeaWiFS and MODIS Projects. Despite the changes in the archive, he continued working at the DAAC (now the Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center, GES DISC) with the Giovanni system, led by Greg Leptoukh. Leptoukh convinced him to propose a ocean color history book in response to the call from the NASA History and Science Divisions, which led to this manuscript. Acker is an avid swimmer, sports fan, science reader, moviegoer, and advocate of the Giovanni data system. He is married with three children and lives in the Baltimore suburbs of Maryland. He has published 42 research publications as an author or co-author.