Dr. Nektarios Chrysoulakis is a Director of Research at FORTH and Head of the Remote Sensing Lab (http://rslab.gr). He holds a BSc in Physics, a MSc in Environmental Physics and PhD in Remote Sensing from the University of Athens. He has been involved in R&D projects funded by the European Union, the European Space Agency and the Ministries of Environment, Development, Culture and Education. His main research interests include climate change and urbanization, urban climate, urban energy balance, urban resilience, urban planning and metabolism, natural and technological hazards, surface temperature and albedo, environmental monitoring and change detection. Dr. Chrysoulakis is cPI of the European Research Council (ERC) Synergy project urbisphere, focusing on coupling dynamic cities and climate. He has coordinated the projects CURE (H2020), URBANFLUXES (H2020), SEN4RUS (ERA.Net-RUS Plus), BRIDGE (FP7) GEOURBAN (FP7). He has also participated projects CoCO2(H2020), HARMONIA (H2020), ECOPOTENTIAL (H2020), THINKNATURE (H2020), IGIC (LIFE) and FLIRE (LIFE). Dr. Chrysoulakis is the Chair of the Board of Directors of the Eratosthenes Centre of Excellence (https://eratosthenes.org.cy), in Earth Observation, space technology and geospatial analysis. Dr. Chrysoulakis is a Visiting Professor at the Department of Physics of the University of Crete, teaching the course “Principles and Applications of Satellite Remote Sensing”; and at the CIHEAM-MAICh, teaching the course “Remote sensing of Urban Environments”. He was the Conference Chair of the Joint Urban and Remote Sensing Event JURSE2023. Since 2016 he has been co-Chair of the SPIE Conference on Remote Sensing Technologies and Applications in Urban Environments. Dr. Chrysoulakis is the Finance Chair of the IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium IGARSS 2024. He is involved in GEO Climate Change Working Group, as well as in GEO Programme Board Urban Resilience Subgroup. He has more than 300 publications in per-review journals and conference proceedings.
As a Fulbright Scholar, Dr. Chrysoulakis will be hosted at Yale University, in the Yale School of Environment and the Hixon Center for Urban Sustainability, New Haven, Connecticut. He will conduct research on the developing of a conceptual approach to combine multi-sensor observations to estimate the spatio-temporal patterns of urban radiation budget at local scale. A multiscale and multi-sensor analysis method for surface albedo, emissivity and kinetic temperature estimation will be designed, exploiting visible, near infrared, shortwave infrared, mid-infrared and thermal infrared observations from existing and emergent spaceborne sensors acquiring at different spatio-temporal scales. Several technical issues must be overcome to achieve this goal, as deriving radiation budget by spaceborne sensors in an urban setting, with strongly anisotropic radiometric behavior, is challenging. A validation study will also be designed, based on in-situ observations by net-radiometers at selected cities where flux towers are available. This research is expected to advance the current knowledge of the impacts of urban radiation budget on urban climate and on energy consumption, allowing insight into strategies for heat mitigation.