Remote Sensing Data Analyst at Science Systems and Applications Inc. (SSAI)

Science Systems and Applications Inc. (SSAI) is actively recruiting a Remote Sensing Data Analyst for our soil moisture mapping project at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. This role involves compiling, processing, analyzing, and validating soil moisture data, preparing it for public release, and supporting the publication of research results.

Job Responsibilities

• Support GIS applications for microwave remote sensing soil moisture data.
• Process, review, and analyze microwave remote sensing data from airborne instruments (primarily passive microwave data, but may include active microwave data sets).
• Locate, acquire, and process ancillary data sets such as soil moisture data, local municipality land use data, satellite data, and GIS data sets.
• Independently make sound, scientifically informed decisions on dataset usage.
• Create plots and visualizations of data.
• Develop and execute algorithms on remote sensing data.
• Perform tasks such as downloading raw instrument data, subsetting data spatially and temporally, generating images, and calculating instrument performance metrics.
• Construct and test retrieval algorithms, including satellite mission observations, orbital coverage, and mission design and trade studies.
• Write code to create or adapt models for microwave remote sensing and generate plots, tables, and images from model output.
• Document code, algorithms, procedures, and results meticulously.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in a related field with 8 years of relevant experience or an equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Proficiency in MATLAB and Git.
• Experience in plotting and visualizing data.
• Familiarity with GIS data.
• Experience in remote sensing data analysis.
• Strong communication and documentation skills.
• Ability to work independently with minimal oversight.
• Comfortable reaching out to other research groups and data stakeholders to acquire and work with ancillary datasets, requiring communication through various methods, including in-person, phone, virtual meetings, and emails.

Desired Qualifications

• Ability to support airborne instrument campaigns as an instrument operator with necessary medical clearance for airborne work.
• Master's degree in physics, GIS, electrical engineering, or a similar field.
• Experience in remote sensing, specifically with microwave data.
• Experience with airborne instrument datasets.
• Proficiency in Python (desired, but not required).
• Experience with NCCS computing.

EOE, including disability/vets

Physical Requirements

While performing the duties of this job, the employee is regularly required to stand, walk, and use hands to touch, handle or feel objects, tools, or controls. The employee frequently needs to talk and hear, and is occasionally required to reach with hands and arms, stoop, kneel, crouch, or crawl. Must be able to lift and/or move up to 10 pounds regularly and up to 25 pounds occasionally. Specific vision abilities needed include close vision, peripheral vision, depth perception, and the ability to adjust focus.