Lecturer to discuss role in ‘Ground Zero’ recovery effort

Three days after the devastating terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York in September 2001, a small plane equipped with a special instrument called a lidar began daily flights over the wreckage.

Lidar, a cousin of radar that uses a laser beam instead of radio waves, enabled emergency officials to “see through” the thick, acrid smoke that billowed over “Ground Zero” long after the attack, obtain the first clear images of the mountain of debris and coordinate early recovery efforts.

Sean Ahearn is a UW–Madison graduate and associate professor at New York’s Hunter College who headed the scientific team that converted the lidar data into usable maps and pictures. He will discuss the effort in a free illustrated public lecture at 4 p.m., Monday, April 28, in 3650 George Mosse Humanities Building, 455 North Park St.

In his talk, “Dead Crows, Bengal Tigers, and the Big Apple: Modeling Complex Systems in Space and Time,” Ahearn also will describe how he has used other remote sensing and geographic information system technologies to track the movement of the West Nile virus in and around New York City and to study factors influencing the survival of endangered Bengal tigers in Nepal.

Ahearn received his Ph.D. in environmental monitoring from UW–Madison in 1986. His lecture is sponsored by the university’s Spatial Information and Analysis Consortium, University Lectures Committee, Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, Department of Geography, and Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

For more information, contact Bob Gurda, 262-6850, rfgurda@facstaff.wisc.edu.