Dr. Bo-Cai Gao

Bo-Cai Gao is conducts research in the remote sensing of atmospheric water vapor, cirrus clouds, coastal waters, and surface temperatures. He is with the Washington, DC, Naval Research Laboratory Remote Sensing Division. In the early 1990s, through analysis of high spatial and spectral resolution NASA/JPL Airborne Visible Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) data, Bo-Cai discovered that the 0.94 µm water vapor band is useful for assessing precipitable water vapor from space over land and that the 1.375 µm water vapor band is sensitive for detecting thin cirrus clouds during the daytime: narrow channels in both water vapor bands are implemented on the NASA EOS/MODIS satellite instrument. He is an associated editor for IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters. He received a Prize Paper Award from the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (IGARSS) in 1991 for development of an operational atmospheric radiative transfer code to retrieve surface reflectance spectra from AVIRIS data. He was a member of the UCSC-ARC HyspIRI Team that received the NASA Group Achievement Award for outstanding scientific achievement for characterizing California coastal water quality and harmful algal blooms during drought (2018) and a member of the Terra Science Team that received the NASA Pecora Award (2019). Bo-Cai received his B.S. in Physics from Nankai University in the People's Republic of China and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Physics from Ohio State University.