Using remote sensing data, senior Paul Lin looked for signals of climate change in the grasslands of the Great Plains.
For the last several decades, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has sent satellites to orbit the earth, using radiation reflected by the planet’s surface to generate data on weather to wildfires to urbanization.
To make sense of the reams of data these satellites accumulate requires expertise—and coding—that Paul Lin, a senior on the cusp of graduating, has acquired taking courses across schools and departments at Penn.
For his culminating thesis, the earth science major from Clarksville, Maryland, used this information, known as remote sensing data, to assess long-term and broad changes in plant populations in the Great Plains.