Participant ID: 15 - King's College London (KCL)
	http://www.kcl.ac.uk/

Expertise and experience King's College London was established by King George IV in 1829 and became one of the founding colleges of the University of London. It now has some 17,160 students and occupies a leading position in UK higher education, enjoying a world-wide reputation for research and teaching. The Department of Geography has a long established international reputation as a centre of research excellence, employing 34 full time academic staff and has one of the largest Geography graduate schools in the UK (with ~100 Masters students and 30 PhD students). The Environmental Monitoring and Modelling (EMM) research group within the Department has 10 full time academic staff focussing on the in situ and remote sensing-based monitoring of key environmental phenomena at the land surface and at the interfaces with the atmosphere and hydrosphere, and the use of simulation modelling of those systems to pose and answer key environmental questions. The Department has long-standing expertise in studies related to both fire and the African continent, including associated perturbations to the land and atmosphere. Recent work has included estimating carbon emissions for forest fires across the whole of boreal Russia (Zhang et al., 2003), proof that the incomplete combustion of vegetation during savanna fires is not, as has been hypothesised previously, leading to major underestimations of fire-related carbon fluxes (Smith et al., 2005), and the development of the first prototype methodology for the derivation of fire radiative power and energy from geostationary EO (Roberts et al., 2005). Role in this project WP4: Provision of EO-derived active fire location and fire radiative power and energy data, experimental investigation of relationship between fire radiative energy and fuel mass consumed, derivation and validation (with partners) of fire-related carbon emissions from combined active fire location, burned area, and FRE datasets. Principal Investigator and collaborators Martin Wooster (Prof.), Principal Investigator, is the leader of the EMM research group, focussing on the use of satellite and ground-based EO data in the study of fire and other land surface processes. He has been studying the use of thermal remote sensing, including in applications related to fire, since 1994 and is the author of over 40 peer-reviewed journal papers, including first author papers in JGR, GRL, Remote Sensing of Environment and GBC. In the last five years Professor Wooster has been PI of four large national research projects (70 - 700k euro), three of which focused on the remote sensing of fire, and is a co-investigator on a current ESA 'ECOFIRE' study on satellite-derived active fire and smoke plume products, a science team member for the Bi-spectral Infrared Detection (BIRD) small satellite dedicated to 'high temperature event' observations, and a member of the EUMETSAT Meteosat Third Generation working group advising on potential future operational fire products for climate investigation. Professor Wooster has been Principal or Co-investigator for high temperature event work on the SEVIRI, AATSR, BIRD, ALOS and ATSR-2 systems. Gareth Roberts (Dr.), is an expert in both optical and thermal remote sensing, undertaking research in the use of Kalman filters in providing enhanced abilities to retrieve accurate surface albedo estimates from satellite EO data, validating MODIS land surface products on the African continent, and developing the ability to derive estimates of fire radiative power from SEVIRI at unprecedented temporal scales. Dr Roberts has published eight peer-reviewed papers. Bruce D. Malamud (Dr.), is an expert in the statistical analyses and mathematical modelling of natural and technological hazards, including wildfires, earthquakes, floods, landslides, and heavy-metal contamination. He is co-leader of the Hazards, Vulnerability, and Risk Research Unit at King's College London, and has extensive experience in EC grant organization, as, in addition to other grants, he is presently on the Project Executive Board (five scientists) overseeing the progress of 16 partners in eight countries (>90 scientists) on the European Commission Framework 6 STREP NEST project 12975-E2C2 Extreme Events: Causes and Consequences (€1.5M, 3/05-2/08). He presently has 25 peer-review journal articles, including first-author publications in EPSL, JGR, Proceedings of National Academy of USA, Physics World, Science, is chief editor for the EGU/AGU journal Nonlinear Processes in Geophysics, and is secretary and alternate to the president for the Natural Hazards division of EGU. Example publications