Paul Curran
A prolific academic author whose career has encompassed positions
ranging from researcher at NASA to vice chancellor of Bournemouth
University, he talks to Olivia Edward about why some Vietnam veterans
are interested in chlorophyll measurements and what it takes to
transform an institution.
I saw the first imagery from space from the first Earth observation satellites when I was at university. I suddenly realised that everything in which I had been interested up until that point – science, geography, the environment – was all there in one image. You could see the links between soil, geomorphology and vegetation and the way humans were using the land. All the interrelations that people had previously studied in piecemeal were suddenly there in one view. The potential was huge. Nobody was doing much with them at the time. They were just thinking about them like maps and trying to draw lines on them, but I thought they could offer a lot more.
During the mid-1970s, when I started my PhD in remote sensing at the University of Bristol, people had just started to use satellite images in a quantitative way. It was an important shift away from using them as aerial photographs and towards using them in a numerical way as a data source.
We knew Earth observation was going to be central to the study of climate change. During the 1980s, people began to realise that the only way to really understand the environmental changes taking place on a global scale was to study them on a global scale. And the only way you could do that was from space. As soon as those links were realised, Earth observation wasn’t just of interest, it was essential.
The planet’s population is currently running a big experiment: pumping lots of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. We still don’t know what the effect will be. Lots of environmental modelling needs to be done. You need to know season length to model climate change. And the only way you can do that is by monitoring when plants green up and when they die off. We’ve been doing this by monitoring the chlorophyll concentration of the planet using imaging spectrometry (recording the chemicals on the Earth’s surface
by bouncing sunlight off them and recording its spectrum). We’ve found the season length is increasing, so more CO2 is being fixed on the Earth’s surface. But it’s a short-term stay of execution –within a few years, that carbon will break down and be released back into the environment.
There are lots of others uses of the MERIS Terrestrial Chlorophyll Index. For example, you can record where the largest concentrations of Agent Orange were dropped on Vietnam. Because it has such a long half-life, you can still see it from space with a sensor. It’s still there. If you’re a Vietnam veteran suing your government because you’ve had Agent Orange dropped on you, that’s really useful information.
Most of the satellites in space are up there for good scientific reasons. And governments are committed to them in a way that I wasn’t sure they would be in the early days – I think because of the pressure of climate change. If you look at the British spend on civil space activities, way more than half goes into Earth observation, much more than on micro-gravity or planetary astronomy. Earth observation is the big player in the UK.
It feels really good to have made a difference here at Bournemouth University. When I arrived, it had some of the least satisfied students in the country. We’ve been through a bit of trauma, but now we’re the fastest rising university in The Times league table and we’ve been number one new university in the Guardian league table for two years running. It’s all about people. We lost one third of our academic staff in two years but then we invested in staff development and recruited academic staff from around the world. We want and encourage people who are truly passionate about their subject.
When I was working at the geography department in Sheffield during the 1980s, there was an atmosphere there that I had only experienced a few times in my life. It was an environment all about ideas. When you met people, you would talk about ideas. You wouldn’t talk about where you were going or what you were going to do. It was very exciting. All these people coming at problems from all these different angles. Now I sometimes get that for half an hour at an event, but during that period it was every day. It was phenomenal. And it’s very rare. It’s what I would like all of Bournemouth University to be like in the future.
CV
1968–73 Longslade Upper School, Birstall, Leicester
1973–76 BSc in geography, University of Sheffield
1976–79 PhD, University of Bristol
1976–88 Academic positions at Bristol, Reading and Sheffield universities
1988–89 Senior research associate, NASA Ames Research Center, California
1990–present Geography professor at Swansea, then Southampton
1991 Awarded DSc, University of Bristol
1998 Awarded management MBA, University of Southampton
2003–04 Head of Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton)
2005–present Vice chancellor of Bournemouth University
2009–present President of the Remote Sensing and Photogrammetry Society
2007 Received the Patron’s Medal from the Royal Geographical Society
January 2010
I saw the first imagery from space from the first Earth observation satellites when I was at university. I suddenly realised that everything in which I had been interested up until that point – science, geography, the environment – was all there in one image. You could see the links between soil, geomorphology and vegetation and the way humans were using the land. All the interrelations that people had previously studied in piecemeal were suddenly there in one view. The potential was huge. Nobody was doing much with them at the time. They were just thinking about them like maps and trying to draw lines on them, but I thought they could offer a lot more.
During the mid-1970s, when I started my PhD in remote sensing at the University of Bristol, people had just started to use satellite images in a quantitative way. It was an important shift away from using them as aerial photographs and towards using them in a numerical way as a data source.
We knew Earth observation was going to be central to the study of climate change. During the 1980s, people began to realise that the only way to really understand the environmental changes taking place on a global scale was to study them on a global scale. And the only way you could do that was from space. As soon as those links were realised, Earth observation wasn’t just of interest, it was essential.
The planet’s population is currently running a big experiment: pumping lots of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. We still don’t know what the effect will be. Lots of environmental modelling needs to be done. You need to know season length to model climate change. And the only way you can do that is by monitoring when plants green up and when they die off. We’ve been doing this by monitoring the chlorophyll concentration of the planet using imaging spectrometry (recording the chemicals on the Earth’s surface
by bouncing sunlight off them and recording its spectrum). We’ve found the season length is increasing, so more CO2 is being fixed on the Earth’s surface. But it’s a short-term stay of execution –within a few years, that carbon will break down and be released back into the environment.
There are lots of others uses of the MERIS Terrestrial Chlorophyll Index. For example, you can record where the largest concentrations of Agent Orange were dropped on Vietnam. Because it has such a long half-life, you can still see it from space with a sensor. It’s still there. If you’re a Vietnam veteran suing your government because you’ve had Agent Orange dropped on you, that’s really useful information.
Most of the satellites in space are up there for good scientific reasons. And governments are committed to them in a way that I wasn’t sure they would be in the early days – I think because of the pressure of climate change. If you look at the British spend on civil space activities, way more than half goes into Earth observation, much more than on micro-gravity or planetary astronomy. Earth observation is the big player in the UK.
It feels really good to have made a difference here at Bournemouth University. When I arrived, it had some of the least satisfied students in the country. We’ve been through a bit of trauma, but now we’re the fastest rising university in The Times league table and we’ve been number one new university in the Guardian league table for two years running. It’s all about people. We lost one third of our academic staff in two years but then we invested in staff development and recruited academic staff from around the world. We want and encourage people who are truly passionate about their subject.
When I was working at the geography department in Sheffield during the 1980s, there was an atmosphere there that I had only experienced a few times in my life. It was an environment all about ideas. When you met people, you would talk about ideas. You wouldn’t talk about where you were going or what you were going to do. It was very exciting. All these people coming at problems from all these different angles. Now I sometimes get that for half an hour at an event, but during that period it was every day. It was phenomenal. And it’s very rare. It’s what I would like all of Bournemouth University to be like in the future.
CV
1968–73 Longslade Upper School, Birstall, Leicester
1973–76 BSc in geography, University of Sheffield
1976–79 PhD, University of Bristol
1976–88 Academic positions at Bristol, Reading and Sheffield universities
1988–89 Senior research associate, NASA Ames Research Center, California
1990–present Geography professor at Swansea, then Southampton
1991 Awarded DSc, University of Bristol
1998 Awarded management MBA, University of Southampton
2003–04 Head of Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton)
2005–present Vice chancellor of Bournemouth University
2009–present President of the Remote Sensing and Photogrammetry Society
2007 Received the Patron’s Medal from the Royal Geographical Society
January 2010
