Dr. Kevin Gallo is a physical scientist with the center for Satellite Applications and Research of NOAA/NESDIS and physically located at the EROS, where he is the lead investigator on several collaborative research efforts related to land-atmosphere processes and interactions. Dr. Gallo's research activities have included fundamental and applied issues related to satellite-based asessment of urban heat island phenomena (warmer air temperatures associated with urban compared to rural environments). More recently, Dr. Gallo has been active in research on the use of remotely sensed data to characterize and monitor land surface related biophysical variables used in numerical weather forecast models. He has also initiated comparisons of several remotely-sensed data sets to determine the continuity of historic and current satellite-derived vegetation indices with those of future sensors. Dr. Gallo is currently a member of the Visible/Infrared Imager/Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) Operational Algorighm Team, the NOAA/NESDIS Land Surface Product Oversight Panel, and the NASA/EOSDIS Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center's Science Advisory Panel. Dr. Gallo received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Agricultural Climatology/Remote Sensing from Purdue University and a B.S. Degree in Geography/Meteorology from Northern Illinois University.

Fig. 1. Five-year mean monthly satellite-derived fractional green vegetation cover (fgreen) for the three most dominant land cover classes at six different locations in the South-Central Plains of the United States. Fractional green vegetation cover is a land surface variable used in numerical weather forecast models.
Fig. 2. Time series of the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) observed with the AVHRR (onboard NOAA-16) and MODIS (onboard Terra) sensors for nine different land cover types as part of a sensor intercomparison and data continuity study.