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Named after one of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center’s first pioneers in using remote sensing to investigate Earth and its environment, the William Nordberg Memorial Award is the center’s most prestigious peer award for Earth science. For years, Joanna Joiner has worked alongside many of its recipients. In 2020, she became the latest member of the esteemed list.
Part of the Goddard Atmospheric Chemistry and Dynamics Laboratory, she was recognized for her scientific leadership and breakthroughs in the remote sensing of clouds, trace gases and photosynthesis. Her work over the years has ranged from analyzing how gases and particles in the atmosphere interact with sunlight and heat to detecting fluorescence from vegetation with satellites.
“One of the exciting things for me is to be able to be creative. Nobody has ever said to me, ‘You can’t work on this or that,’” Joiner said. “They’ve only given me encouragement, and it’s really been a wonderful environment to work in.”
Some of her projects may have fizzled out over time, while others became more exciting, but there have always been new and exciting directions to pursue. These include determining amounts of various trace gases in the atmosphere using several different satellite instruments, figuring out how high the clouds are in the atmosphere and – more recently – investigating the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on pollution.
“We took some of the techniques we developed for remote sensing of fluorescence from plants and applied them to retrieve sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere more accurately than we had ever been able to do,” Joiner explained of a recent achievement, while recognizing the contributions of her entire team. “I’m very proud of the work that my whole group has done. It’s a group effort. I’m getting the honor here, but really, it’s the work of many people.”
Past recipients of the Nordberg Award include some of Joiner’s collaborators as well as some of her closest mentors.
“It means so much to be on the same page. I’m looking at all the winners, and I’ve had the good fortune to work with several of the people on this list and admire them greatly and consider them mentors,” she said. “It’s really just a great honor to be among these scientists.”
Joanna Joiner (left, U.S. science team leader) with fellow international team leads – Pieternel Levelt (principal investigator, Netherlands) and Johanna Tamminen (co-principal investigator, Finland) – for the Ozone Monitoring Instrument. Photo courtesy: Joanna Joiner