Christoph C. Borel received a diploma in electrical engineering (Dipl. El. Ing. ETH) in 1981 from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland. He specialized in the areas of information theory, control theory and network theory. From 1981-1983 he held a research position with the Institute of Communication Technology at the ETH under Prof. Peter Leuthold. He worked on bit-error structures and simulations fiber optic transmission systems. In the fall of 1983 he joined the Microwave Remote Sensing Laboratory (MIRSL) of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA. He received a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from UMass in 1988 with a thesis on scattering models of vegetation in the millimeter wave region under Prof 's Bob McIntosh and Cal Swift.
In 1988 he joined the Theoretical Division of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, NM and worked for Dr. Sig Gerstl. As a postdoctoral fellow he worked on the implementation of the radiosity theory, design and construction of an artificial canopy and atmospheric correction algorithms. In 1990 he joined the Space Science and Technology which later became the Non-proliferation and International Security Division as a staff member. His current research interests are vegetation modeling in the visible and infrared using the radiosity method, computer graphics algorithms, image analysis, hyperspectral image analysis and synthesis, and atmospheric corrections.
From 1992 to 1995 he participated in the Accelerated Canopy Chemistry Program (ACCP) led by Prof. Alex Goetz under the NASA's High-Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (HIRIS) program. He investigated the effect of multiple scattering in vegetation on hyperspectral signatures. He was the principal investigator on a project entitled "Radiosity Modeling for Remote Sensing" funded by NASA HQ through Dr. Diane Wickland from 1993 to 1996. He is currently investigating retrieval methods of land-surface temperatures for complex terrain under a 3-year program funded by NASA's Terrestrial Ecology Program (TEP). He worked with the Multi-angle Imaging Spectro-Radiometer (MISR) science team member Dr. Sig Gerstl on algorithms to determine the clear sky albedo at the top of the atmosphere from nine views using model inversions. He is the deputy team leader for the modeling and science analysis team on the DOE sponsored Multispectral Thermal Imager (MTI) project. He is spear-heading the algorithm development for physics based water and land temperature retrievals, vegetation status, chlorophyll retrieval in water, water vapor retrievals over heterogeneous surfaces, material identification, radiometric, geometric and atmospheric correction of data, end-to-end simulation of the imaging system and image restoration methods. He was also a participant in DOE's Hyperspectral InfraRed Imaging Spectrometer (HIRIS) program where he was involved in thermal hyperspectral scene simulation, gas plume signatures phenomenology, Fourier Transform Spectroscopy (FTS) calibrations and processing algorithms and development of temperature/emissivity separation and atmospheric correction algorithms.
In 1981 he received a first place IEEE award for his Diploma thesis on speech signal analysis and encoding. In 1985 he received first prize in the USNC/URSI student paper contest for a paper entitled "A scattering model for foliage in the millimeter wave region using fractal theory". In 1996 he received a "Best of Session" award at the ERIM 11th thematic conference on geologic remote sensing and an award from Los Alamos National Laboratory. In 1998 he was a recipient of a Los Alamos achievement award for the participation in the HIRIS program. He has published over 50 scientific papers in the area of remote sensing in the optical and microwave regime.
He has been involved in research projects sponsored by the Department of Energy, Swiss Postal Office, US Air Force, Army Research Office and NASA. He currently serves as associate editor for IEEE Transaction on Geoscience and Remote Sensing in the area of optical and hyperspectral remote sensing. He became a senior member of IEEE in 1997 for his contributions to remote sensing sciences and long-time involvement in student branches, local section and chapters from 1980 until now.
Selected References:
Christoph C. Borel, "Surface Emissivity and Temperature Retrieval for a Hyperspectral Sensor", IGARSS'98 conference in Seattle, WA, July 6-10, 1998.
Christoph C. Borel, William B. Clodius and Pierre V. Villeneuve, "Synthetic hyperspectral data cubes for complex thermal scenes", SPIE conference on Imaging Spectrometry IV, July 19-24, 1998, San Diego, CA.
D. Schlaepfer, C.C. Borel, J. Keller and K.I Itten, "Atmospheric pre-corrected differential absorption technique to retrieve columnar water vapor", RSE Vol. 65, no. 3, pp 353-366, 1998.