Announcement of RESAC Selections

David E. Steitz
Headquarters, Washington, DC
October 22, 1998
(Phone: 202/358-1730)

RELEASE: 98-193

NASA SELECTS REGIONAL EARTH SCIENCE APPLICATIONS CENTERS

NASA's Office of Earth Science has selected nine public/private consortia throughout the U. S. to form seven Regional Earth Science Applications Centers (RESACs). The RESAC program will use NASA's Earth science results, technologies and data products to help resolve issues with regional economic and policy significance and to support regional assessments supporting the U.S. Global Change Research Program.

The centers selected will be comprised of "end-to-end" consortia (from user needs definition to product delivery) and will include members from the research community, private industry, public agencies and other potential information users in the public and private sectors. The selected consortia involve over 20 private companies, about ten state and local government agencies, 20 Federal agency regional offices, and 15 universities.

The RESACs will apply state-of-the-art NASA Earth science research results to such diverse areas as precision farm management; monitoring of forest growth and health; regional water resources and hydrology; assessment of the impact of long-term climate variability and change; land cover and land use mapping; agricultural crop disease and infestation detection; management of fire hazards; watershed and coastal management; environmental monitoring; and primary and secondary science education.

For example, one RESAC will address water management problems in the arid Southwestern U. S. Using hydrologic models derived from NASA-sponsored research, the RESAC will use spaceborne and airborne instruments to provide improved information on water resource availability. This information will assist planners in developing strategies for resource allocation among competing economic and environmental uses in a rapidly evolving global economy.

"Regional-scale problems are well-suited to NASA's Earth science data and technology; no other system of observation is available for analyzing such large-scale issues," said Dr. Ghassem Asrar, Associate Administrator for Earth Science, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC. "This program will capitalize on the science and technology developed over the past decade by NASA's Earth Science enterprise to provide solutions to practical and societal problems that exist today and help in mitigating them in the future."

"The selection of the RESACs is the first of a number of planned NASA initiatives to develop new methods for bringing together the research, service and user communities to apply NASA's research results to practical, near-term problems," added Alex Tuyahov, Manager, Earth Science Applications Research Program, NASA Headquarters.

The selected consortia are: Northern Great Plains RESAC, led by George A. Seielstad of the University of North Dakota
Northeast Applications of Useable Technology In Land Planning for Urban Sprawl RESAC, led by Chester Arnold of the University of Connecticut
NASA Southwest Earth Science Applications Center, led by Roger C. Bales of the University of Arizona
Upper Great Lakes RESAC, led by Marvin E. Bauer of the University of Minnesota, St. Paul
Midwest Center for Natural Resource Management, led by George R. Diak of the University of Wisconsin, Madison
Wildlands Fire Hazard Center, led by Christopher Lee of the California State University, Dominguez Hills
Great Plains RESAC, led by Edward A. Martinko of the University of Kansas
California Water Resources Research and Applications Center, led by Norman L. Miller of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Mid-Atlantic RESAC Center, led by Stephen D. Prince of the University of Maryland, College Park

NASA is investing approximately $14 million in these seven new RESACs in FY99. The three-year grants will take advantage of NASA's extensive Earth Science program, a long term effort to study human-induced and natural changes in the whole Earth system.