At the beginning of the year, ABE’s Jasmeet Judge, Ph.D. was awarded a prestigious Fulbright Kalam-Climate Scholarship to travel to India for five months in collaboration with two prominent Indian Universities to promote and implement cutting-edge research in the field of remote sensing. Her experience abroad embodied the spirit of the Fulbright Program, the ethos of cultural education, cultural exchange, and cultural literacy. The trip also highlighted the synergy of Judge’s impressive intellectual acumen, sense of adventure and enthusiasm- and a tiny pinch of good timing and good luck.
The primary motivation for the trip was to collaborate with Indian researchers in utilizing satellite data for timely agricultural information for water management, crop assessment, and to train the next generation of Indian scientists in microwave remote sensing. The five-month program allowed her to make connections with Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in south India (Bengaluru)) and Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi (IIT-Delhi), to collaborate on a novel satellite project that will utilize new microwave technology to provide global soil moisture data.
The length of stay for Judge was critical to her ability to integrate and establish relationships with the farmers and engineers there, “I think five months was perfect because you have that sort of ‘honeymoon’ time where you’re just meeting new people and there’s no reflection on what you were doing. After a few months you feel like OK, I’m here, I’m in this routine, these people know me, I’m integrated. Then you can start to get some work done at a deeper level and make long-term plans.”
In Summer 2025, a new satellite mission, the NASA-Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR), will launch, providing microwave data that can be used for generating soil moisture, crop biomass and stress products. Combined with available data from optical, infrared, and existing microwave sensors, NISAR data can help fill the gap in obtaining high-resolution global soil moisture and crop biomass/stress products every 2-3 days for farmers and water managers.
“If I can combine the data sets with domain knowledge, then we can get data at higher resolution. My interest and goal is to develop data fusion and AI algorithms to combine different data sets and models to improve spatial and temporal resolution,” Judge said.
Judge, who also directs the UF/IFAS Center for Remote Sensing, brings three decades of experience in researching microwave remote sensing, supported by NASA awards. The main goal of her research is to understand how water interacts with soil and vegetation by using both remote sensing and computer models, such as hydrologic and crop growth models. “Soil moisture information is important for understanding crop growth, for irrigation scheduling, and for understanding hydrological balance. This information can shape policy and decision-making perspectives both at farm and national level.”
“Traditional optical satellite imagery can be tricky as the waves that are used to collect data can be blocked by clouds,” Judge explains, “Microwave remote sensing is highly sensitive to changes in soil moisture and makes it possible to bridge the gap between small-scale studies at the field level and larger-scale studies at the regional and global scales. Also, microwaves can penetrate vegetation and give a more accurate picture of soil moisture than other wavelengths.”
“NISAR will have a global moisture product every 6 to 8 days. We have a site in Florida that is a calibration and validation site for the product, and we’re working with the NISAR science team on that. So, when I wrote the Fulbright it was to establish a similar site in south India to see how we can improve the product for agriculture regions in India,” she explained.
Getting accurate soil moisture information for heterogeneous farmlands and farming practices in India can be challenging. Farmers will often plant crops using companion planting strategies, watering schedules can be erratic depending upon the availability of electricity, and swaths of fallow land may be interspersed amongst fields bursting with vegetation.
“In India, one pixel, viewed by the satellite, might have intermingled crops- banana, turmeric, ginger, sunflower, garlic- they have 6-8 crops, and one part could be irrigated, and one could be not irrigated; it’s very heterogenous. Also, they water according to their electricity and water availability. With NISAR, you get one soil moisture value per pixel,” Judge emphasizes. To address this, during NISAR overpasses, there has to be some on-the-ground data collection to compare and improve the satellite product. Judge continues, “It can be challenging to really understand the product at a sub-pixel level. We’re expecting to understand it by combining the heterogenous information about what’s happening on the ground with what NISAR will actually see.”
Judge’s Fulbright also had a teaching component. The specific objectives were to discover existing gaps in remote sensing training of the students at IISc and to understand remote sensing skills needed for the research projects conducted at their Interdisciplinary Center for Water Research (ICWaR), and to develop and co-teach a 4-week intensive course in Microwave Remote Sensing in Hydrology. Judge developed the 4-week course for advanced PhD students and early career researchers at IISc.
“We are going to have a global product. We want to evaluate and see how good that product is, to see what its uncertainty and accuracy is for an Indian agricultural context. That was my Fulbright. I want to work with the students there and the faculty there, to design an experiment for the agricultural area where there is ongoing strong collaborations with the farmers, and see what their management routines are, especially on the day NISAR flies overhead – every six to eight days. On the day of the overpass, we want to know what has happened in the field. Currently, students are not trained to do this sort of sampling and data collection, I will continue to work with them even when I am back in the US,” she professed.
Remarkably, fortune favors the brilliant, and while on her Fulbright tenure, Judge discovered that she had secured another fellowship, VAIshwik BHArtiya Vaigyanik (VAIBHAV), through the Ministry of Science and Technology, Government of India, which will allow her to further enhance the research and collaborations she initiated on her five-month Fulbright trip.
“I got the Fulbright, and then when I was there, in February, I found out we also got the VAIBHAV which will sponsor my return to India to continue this research and uphold these collaborations. So now I have a long-term relationship for three years and in that time frame, I will go to India for two months every year,” Judge said.
In addition to seizing the opportunity to advance critical research, and connect with industry professionals, students, and faculty, Judge enjoyed an opportunity to immerse herself in the culture of southern India as well, taking a Kannada language course, and discovering a connection with a faculty member at IIT-Delhi, who develops 3D hydrological model connecting surface and ground water.
“I’ve been looking for such a person for 25 years because my dissertation used land surface modeling and we still want to improve that. I was so excited about it and turns out he had a graduate student interested in this work, and so we started meeting every two weeks- I gave them my dissertation, and they are going to use our dataset to test their new model,” she enthused.
“If I get to do it again, I wouldn’t change a single thing. Mentoring those students and working with the faculty was really fun, and we created enduring connections to move this research forward.”
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