Brian Cairns
NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, NY, USA
Dr. Cairns was educated in the United Kingdom at Chesterfield School and received an engineering degree from the University of Cambridge before completing a Ph. D. in physics at the Institute of Optics of the University of Rochester. Dr. Cairns has worked at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies since 1992. His initial work was focused on developing parameterizations of three-dimensional radiation transport through clouds for use in general circulation models (GCMs) and that parameterization continues to be used in the GISS GCM. Since 1996 he has worked on the use of polarimetric remote sensing of the Earth to determine aerosol and cloud properties, initially using the Galileo Photo-Polarimeter-Radiometer engineering model. Subsequently he worked on the development of the Research Scanning Polarimeter (RSP) which was completed in 1999 when it made its first airborne measurements on a single engined Cessna aircraft. The RSP is an extremely accurate polarimeter that makes measurements of intensity and polarization of a broad angular range from 410 to 2260 nm in nine spectral bands. Since 2000 Dr. Cairns has led the integration of the RSP instrument onto seven different platforms and supervised more than twenty different deployments from the Arctic circle to the tropics. During that time the RSP instrument performed impeccably acquiring more than 2000 hours of remote sensing observations with no sensor failures. Dr. Cairns was instrument scientist for the Aerosol Polarimetry Sensor on the NASA Glory mission and is currently Deputy Project Scientist for atmospheres for the PACE mission.
