Larry Di Girolamo

Prof. Di Girolamo is a Blue Waters Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Illinois. His research aims at understanding cloud, aerosol, and radiation processes within the Earth system, with specializations in satellite remote sensing techniques and 3-D radiative transfer models. His current particular interests lie in characterizing the global nature of cloud, aerosol, and radiation properties, how they have changed over the satellite era, the drivers of these changes in the context of weather and climate research, and what impact these changes may have on human health. He works extensively with NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory with a focus on developing and exploiting multi-angle technologies for studying Earth from space. He is a Co-Investigator for NASA’s Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) mission, which was launched in 1999 on the Terra satellite and remains in excellent health, and for NASA’s Multi-Angle Imager for Aerosols (MAIA) that has been selected for launch in 2022. He is also a Science Team Member for the NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on the Terra and Aqua satellites. He has participated in numerous field campaigns across various agencies, most recently NASA’s Cloud, Aerosol and Monsoon Processes – Philippines Experiment (CAMP²Ex). Since his work is computationally expensive and often involves processing petabytes of data, he maintains close collaboration with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), where they work together in solving some grand challenge problems faced by the Earth Science community in the era of Big Data.