Vladimir A. Kovalev, is a Physical Scientist for the Fire, Fuel, and Smoke Science Program. He received his B.S. degree in radio technology from the Technical College in Riga, Latvia. He received his M.S. degree in Radio Engineering from the Leningrad Electro Technology Institute (LETI), and his Ph.D. degree in Geophysics from the Main Geophysical Observatory in Leningrad the U.S.S.R.
Vladimir's work in the Soviet Union included the inspection of instruments for visibility and cloud-base measurements in civil airports; the development of the theory, methodology, and instruments for measuring atmospheric visibility; the scientific supervision of developing and testing lidar instrumentation in the amalgamation “Zenith” in Moscow, as well as the development of the algorithms and software for atmospheric lidar measurements. His duties also included tests and data analysis of the Soviet ozone network instrumentation; the regional and international comparisons and calibrations of the Soviet ozone instrumentation, including the Soviet regional standard spectrophotometer Dobson 108 (Boulder, Co., Mauna-Loa Observatory, Hawaii, Wallops Iceland, etc); the spectral transparency measurements and comparisons sun-photometer techniques utilized in the USSR and the US.
In 1991, Kovalev joined the research team at the US EPA Environmental Monitoring Systems Laboratory in Las Vegas, Nevada - initially as a Visiting Research Scientist and later as a Research Associate for The US National Research Council. He examined algorithms for processing multi-wavelength differential absorption lidar data and investigated methods to correct ozone measurements for atmospheric interference. In 1999 – 2001, he was a Visiting Associate at the University of Iowa, coauthoring a book on lidar remote sensing with Prof. W. Eichinger. He has worked at the Fire Science Laboratory since 2001. Kovalev is an author and coauthor of two books and more than a hundred scientific papers published in the Soviet Union (in Russian) and in the USA (in English).
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