Elizabeth Pattey

Elizabeth Pattey is a retired Canadian scientist. She was principal research scientist at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) and the leader of the micrometeorology laboratory at the Ottawa Research and Development Centre.

Her research supports nationwide improvement in the environmental performance of agriculture, in support of the United Nations' Framework Convention on Climate Change and Canada’s Clean Air Act.

She is the co-author for over 80 peer-reviewed scientific publications,

The resulting model predictions help growers understand what happens in the field so they can manage production more efficiently.

Pattey and Liu thought that a time series of photos taken over a crop canopy for documenting the growth advancement would contain quantitative information that could be evaluated. They developed a histogram-based threshold method to differentiate gaps from plant tissues and then incorporated this image analysis method into GreenCropTracker. This was for her long-standing leadership and significant contributions to agricultural meteorology. She was also awarded the Award for Outstanding Achievement in Biometeorology in 2020, from the American Meteorological Society. This was for pioneering the development of systems that measure surface layer turbulence and the nocturnal boundary layer to quantify particulate matter and trace gas fluxes.