Lee Johnson

Affiliation: NASA ARC-CREST/CSUMB

Branch: Biospheric Science Branch

Email: Lee.F.Johnson@nasa.gov

Professional Biography

Lee Johnson is Senior Research Scientist and Adjunct Research Professor at California State University Monterey Bay, and is affiliated with the Biospheric Science Branch through the NASA ARC-CREST Cooperative Agreement.  His work focuses on agricultural applications of remote sensing with emphasis on crop evapotranspiration monitoring.  He has served as Principal- or Co-Investigator on projects for NASA’s Applied Sciences Program, California Dept. Water Resources, California Dept. Food & Agriculture, and the U.S. Dept. Agriculture.

Lee is a co-developer of NASA’s Satellite Irrigation Management Support, which has monitored crop development and evapotranspiration across California’s irrigated agricultural lands for the past several years.  He is a member of the OpenET Technical Team, which launched a platform to deliver easily accessible satellite-based evapotranspiration estimates throughout the western United States. He has authored or co-authored over 40 peer-reviewed journal articles and has led or contributed to four refereed technical book chapters. 

Education

M.A. Geography, U.C. Santa Barbara

B.A.  Geography/Economics, UCLA

Research Interests

Agricultural applications of remote sensing, crop evapotranspiration modeling, field trials for development & testing of irrigation decision-support tools

Awards & Others

NASA Group Achievement Award (5 total, most recent 2016)

NASA Ames Honor Award co-recipient (2010)

NASA Spinoff – one of agency’s top applied research projects, participant (2003, 2015)

Federal Lab Consortium for Technology Transfer, Far West Outstanding Partnership Award, co-recipient (2011)

Select Publications

Melton, F. and OpenET Technical Team, 2022.  OpenET: Filling a critical data gap in water management for the western United States.  J. Amer. Water Resources Assn. 58:971-994.

Doherty, C., L. Johnson, J Volk, M. Mauter, N. Bambach, A. McElrone, J. Alfieri, L. Hipps, J. Prueger, S. Castro, M. Alsina, W. Kustas, and F. Melton, 2022.  Effects of meteorological and measurement error and land surface modeling uncertainty on errors in winegrape ET calculated with SIMS. Irrigation Science 40:515-530. 

Pereira, L., P. Paredes, F. Melton, L. Johnson, T. Wang, R. López-Urrea, J. Cancela, R. Allen, 2020.  Prediction of crop coefficients from fraction of ground cover and height. Background and validation using ground and remote sensing data.  Special issue: Updates & Advances to the FAO56 Crop Water Requirements Methods.  Agricultural Water Management 241, 106197.