Jeff Dozier

Jeff Dozier was an American snow hydrologist, environmental scientist, researcher and academic. He was distinguished professor emeritus and founding dean of the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Dozier's research and teaching focused on snow science, Earth system science, radiative transfer in snow, remote sensing and information systems, image processing, and terrain analysis.

Dozier was a fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a recipient of the NASA/Department of Interior William T. Pecora Award.

Early life and education While Dozier was at the University of California, Berkeley in the early 1960s, he dropped out after a year and a half and went to Europe where he climbed, and studied German. He then hitchhiked from Germany to India. His experience during this trip inclined him to learn more about Earth's water and climate. He received his B.A. in Geography from California State University, Hayward (now East Bay) in 1968.

Dozier completed the M.Sc. in 1969 and Ph.D. in 1973 in Geography from the University of Michigan. His PhD thesis topic was the hydrology of the Dana fork of the Tuolumne River. In 1971, he joined California State University, Hayward as a lecturer and taught there until he moved to the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1974.

In 1974, Dozier went to the Hindu Kush for his sixth climbing expedition. While crossing a steep slope, Dozier realized that he had no idea whether that slope might avalanche. That experience moved his research interest towards snow and avalanches. From 1990 to 1992 he worked at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center as the senior project scientist at the start of NASA's Earth Observing System, when its configuration was established.

Dozier helped explain optical properties of snow to animators of the film Frozen.

In 1980, he spent a year working for NOAA's National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service in Maryland. There, he and Michael Matson observed tiny bright spots on a satellite image of the Persian Gulf. The image had been captured by the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) instrument on the NOAA-6 satellite, and the spots, they discovered, were campfire-sized flares caused by the burning of methane escaping from oil wells. It marked the first time that such a small fire had been seen from space. He and Matson were intrigued by the possibilities, and Dozier developed a mathematical method to identify small fires in pixels a kilometer in size. This method, published in 1981, became the foundation for nearly all subsequent satellite fire-detection algorithms.

Awards and honors 1991 - Fellow, American Geophysical Union 1999 - Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science 2005 - William T. Pecora Award, Department of Interior and NASA 2009 - Jim Gray eScience Award, Microsoft Research 2018 - 13th Jeremy Grantham Lecturer, Indian Institute of Science

Selected articles