Dr. Jenny Hanafin

Dr. Jenny Hanafin is the Earth Observation Activity Lead at ICHEC. Her extensive experience in many aspects of remote sensing includes ocean, atmosphere and land applications.

She is currently spearheading the development of a national satellite data Platform-as-a-Service facility based on user requirements of interested public agencies, industry and academic parties across Ireland. She supervises a team of postdoctoral researchers and has secured a number of research grants to expand and develop the team further and establish a critical mass of EO expertise at ICHEC.

She has been Principal Investigator and Technical Lead on a number of projects using satellite data: INFER mapped lake water quality across Irish lakes and CoastVal developed new technology to validate coastal water quality and became part of the ESA Sentinel 2 Validation Team activities. Other projects at ICHEC include estimating demand for public electric vehicle chargers, monitoring the restoration of peatlands and developing standards for EO data in AI applications.

In post-doctoral positions Jenny has worked on: assimilation of satellite data into wave models; characterizing storm swells using multi-modal data; and validation of satellite air-sea fluxes and sea surface temperature, building on her PhD (Meteorology and Physical Oceanography) work at the University of Miami. She also worked on the first Irish climate modelling project with UCD and Met Eireann. She is currently the Earth Observation expert on the Global Climate Observing System and Integrated Carbon Observing System national committees and was an active member of the International Electrotechnical Commission national committee for TC114 – Marine Energy Converters for a number of years.