Steven Pestana
Pronouns: he/him
GitHub: spestana
About Me
I’m an interdisciplinary Earth scientist and educator with a background in hydrology, remote sensing, and data science. My work has focused on the methods and technologies used to observe or model water resources with a particular emphasis on the snow-dominated mountain watersheds of the western United States. I’m particularly interested in improving our understanding of hydrologic processes, their interconnections with a changing climate, human impacts, and how we can adapt to those changes. This work has involved remote sensing of forests, snow, and rivers (with drones / UAS, aircraft, and satellites), geospatial analysis of high resolution digital elevation models, and leveraging machine learning methods.
Most recently I worked as a physical scientist in the Watersheds and Fluvial Systems Section at the USGS Washington Water Science Center. Previously, I was a research scientist and instructor at the University of Washington (UW), Seattle. I earned a PhD and MS in Civil and Environmental Engineering with a Data Science emphasis in 2023 and 2019 respectively in the Mountain Hydrology Research Group. I earned a BS in Geology from California State Polytechnic University Pomona in 2015.
I’m also interested in teaching and science communication, whether in the classroom or outdoors, and the development of open source software and hardware. While working at UW, I had the opportunity to mentor undergraduate and graduate students, and to teach the Data Analysis in Water Science course in 2020 and 2023. I’ve also organized and taught at several short course, workshop, and hackathon events such as those through the UW eScience Institute’s Hackweek program. I enjoy volunteering with local parks and environmental organizations to help lead environmental restoration work and educational programs such as guided canoe tours. All of these experiences have sparked an interest in critically examining and improving my own teaching and learning methods.
See the below links for information about past and current projects, activities, and blog posts.
Technical Notes:
- Satellite Sensor Bands in the Visible to Infrared
- Notes on predicting ECOSTRESS overpass timing
- Learning turbpy: sensible heat flux over snow
- EarthHacks: remote sensing urban heat islands
- Steps for setting up a geospatial computing workstation on a Windows PC.
Education, Art, and More:
- Ribbit Network - open-source, low-cost CO2 sensors (read more here)
- How to Graduate: UW CEE grad school
- Acolyte of the Anthropocene (my old blog)
Blog Posts:
- Writing an Inclusion Plan for NASA proposals
- Warming (climate) stripes in python with ulmo
- Teaching Data Analysis in Water Science (Fall 2020)
- American Geophysical Union 2019 Fall Meeting
- Structure from Motion Drone Survey of Easton Glacier
- Structure from Motion Survey of a River Channel