In this seventh and final episode of This Planet’s on Fire, we hear from Dr. Heather Lynch, Professor of Ecology and Evolution at Stony Brook University in New York and Chris McCormick, Founder and Chairman of PlanetiQ/Global Weather & Climate Solutions. Dr. Lynch and Chris join SSPI’s Lou Zacharilla to talk about how satellites are used as tools for a range of important aspects of the climate, including weather and ecology, which are the main focus of the conversation.

Dr. Heather Lynch is a Professor and the IACS Endowed Chair of the Ecology and Evolution Department at Stony Brook University in New York. She has applied her expertise to the analysis of complex ecological data to several important issues, including patterns of survival in mammals and biodiversity patterns in dendritic ecological networks. At Stony Brook University, Dr. Lynch’s research focuses on the application of statistics to conservation biology. It revolves around a project she manages called the Antarctic Site Inventory, a large-scale vessel-based breeding bird survey program. Dr. Lynch was the leader of an expedition that surveyed, on foot for the very first time, parts of a peninsula in the antarctic where penguin colonies were spotted from satellites, as the birds were seen moving further south due to rising temperatures. Prior to Stony Brook, Dr. Lynch was an Adjunct Professor of Applied Math and Statistics at UC Santa Cruz and a Research Scientist in the Biology Department at the University Maryland. She received her A.B. in Physics from Princeton University, an A.M. in Physics from Harvard University, and a Ph.D. in Organismal and Evolutionary Biology, also from Harvard University.

Chris McCormick is the Founder and Chairman of PlanetiQ/Global Weather & Climate Solutions. He has over 3 decades of aerospace, engineering and management experience. Throughout his career, Chris has focused on the development of entirely new mission capabilities, new components, miniaturization and tightly coupled functions leading to the development of “systems on a chip” for space missions. As Chairman of PlanetiQ, Chris is responsible for payload performance and the spacecraft mission, and he works on system design for the next generation of high-performance avionics and the fourth-generation of the Pyxis receivers. Before founding PlanetiQ, Chris managed Moog Inc.’s space sector after Moog purchased Broad Reach Engineering, the company he founded and led for 15 years prior. He also served as systems engineer for the Constellation Observing System for the Meteorology, Ionosphere, and Climate Program (COSMIC), for which he performed studies and filled a number of leadership roles.

PlanetiQ is a weather tech startup founded with the mission of revolutionizing how the world receives weather data through the development of high-definition satellite-based weather forecasting and analytics. The company’s Pyxis high-definition radio occultation (HDRO) instruments are built with advanced technology from across the glob to inform the accuracy of everyday forecasts and the prediction of major global climate events, including hurricanes, tornadoes, snowstorms and more. When GPS signals interact with the Earth’s atmosphere, PlanetiQ’s proprietary satellite-borne sensors capture and analyze data in a process called radio occultation (RO). PlanetiQ is launching a constellation of 20 satellites that will provide more than 50,000 vertical profiles of the atmosphere per day for weather forecasting and climate monitoring, which is more than 20 times the amount of data provided by current technologies.

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