Anne Hale Miglarese to Lead Impact Science Program at Saildrone

Anne Hale Miglarese has spent most of her 35+ year career working with public, private, and non-profit organizations to operationalize and promote satellite remote sensing and geographic information systems (GIS) to improve how we collect environmental data about the planet, and especially, the ocean. In her new role as Impact Science Program Executive Officer, she will develop impact science projects that expand the scope of Saildrone in situ data collection and make it available to scientists around the globe.

“The problems that face humanity due to the changing climate can only be tackled by working together. We need to bring together the best of public science and the best of technology innovation from the private sector, facilitated by funding from a global community of impact partners-and we must start now. We’re thrilled to have Anne leading the charge to develop these critical collaborations,” said COO Sebastien de Halleux.

In 2016, Miglarese founded the Radiant Earth Foundation as a hub for collecting and sharing open satellite imagery training data of the Earth and to help develop machine learning models and expand the interoperability of these tools and data sets. Prior to Radiant Earth, she served as president and CEO of Fugro Earth Data and Planet IQ.

PlanetiQ was founded to build, launch, and operate a commercial constellation of GPS-RO weather satellites. Until this year, the global weather forecast agencies had not committed to using commercially collected space-based observations in their operational models. That changed earlier this summer when the National Weather Service announced it would ingest these observations into their forecast and therefore purchase commercial satellite observations.

“We have witnessed two other market transitions in space technology: the move to commercial launch companies such as SpaceX and Rocket Labs and the emergence of a vibrant commercial satellite earth observation market,” said Miglarese. “I believe the ocean observation community is next. We’ll see a major paradigm shift in how data is collected and delivered, and Saildrone will be at the forefront of that shift.”

Saildrone has previously formed impact partnerships with PEAK6, which supported the 2019–2020 Atlantic to Mediterranean (ATL2MED) mission and the Li Ka Shing Foundation, which supported the 2019 Antarctic Circumnavigation. The data from both missions is open and available to download from the Saildrone Data Explorer. Saildrone distributes data in NetCDF format, an interoperable data format developed to support the creation, access, and sharing of array-oriented scientific data.

Earlier in her career, Miglarese spent a decade leading remote sensing and GIS programs at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and was the first chairperson of the National Geospatial Advisory Committee (NGAC). She is presently a member of the NOAA Advisory Committee on Commercial Remote Sensing. In 2019, she received NOAA’s Vision Award for her lifetime body of work, and she was named the 2018 Geospatial World Woman of the Year. She has been a member of Saildrone’s Advisory Board since 2016.

“There’s a tremendous amount of data collected daily about the Earth, and the convergence of that wealth of data intersected with cloud computing and machine learning is leading to some significant advancements. I’m extremely excited about Saildrone’s ability to drive toward the ‘Quantified Planet’ -to not only collect the data but to make it accessible to the global science community working to address the problems that need to be solved now,” said Miglarese.

Originally published at https://www.saildrone.com.