Vietnamese Agricultural Meteorologists Visit SNR

The School of Natural Resources welcomed a delegation of Vietnamese agricultural meteorologists May 17-26 for an intensive overview of state-of-the-art research and technology related to agricultural meteorology and remote sensing. Their itinerary included a day-long trip to the Agricultural Research Development Center at Mead.

The visitors from the Institute of Meteorology and Hydrology in Hanoi were Ngo Sy Giai, Deputy Director of the Center for Agricultural Meteorology; Nguyen Van Liem, Deputy Director of the Center for Agricultural Meteorology; Nguyen Dinh Luong, Deputy Director of the Center for Hydro-Meteorological and Environmental Station Network; Duong Van Kham, Chief of the Remote Sensing and GIS Division; and Ngo Tien Giang, Chief of the Agro-Meteorology and Agro-Climatology Division.

UNL is “a very good place for training in agricultural meteorology at an advanced level,” said Ngo Sy Giai. “There are good conditions for open cooperation in agricultural meteorology between Vietnam and the United States.”

The group heard 14 presentations from SNR faculty, staff, and students, covering topics such as carbon sequestration, climate change impact assessment, drought impacts, agriculture and sustainable development, economics, crop simulation modeling and monitoring, remote sensing and GIS, windbreaks, microclimates, and field research.  The range of faculty expertise in the School of Natural Resources is quite impressive, said Don Wilhite, director of SNR.

The hosts also stressed the importance of human dimensions – understanding the interactions between humans and the environment – in natural resources management, Wilhite said.

The group traveled to UNL on the recommendation of Ray Motha, chief meteorologist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, who received his PhD from UNL. It also helped that Wilhite had met Ngo Sy Giai in 1997 at a drought training workshop in Israel, sponsored by the World Meteorological Organization.  Wilhite prepared the agenda for the visit of the Vietnamese that principally involved faculty from the Applied Climate Science program and CALMIT. 

One of the next steps will be to write a Memorandum of Understanding that will facilitate future collaboration between SNR and the Institute of Meteorology and Hydrology, Wilhite said. SNR faculty and graduate student and the visitors were envisioning opportunities for future collaborative research and study.

At the Agricultural Research Development Center at Mead, Art Zygielbaum, a SNR PhD Candidate specializing in Remote Sensing, showed the Vietnamese visitors a research platform  known as “Hercules.” This platform makes canopy-level spectral measurements to see how healthy plants are. In this picture, our visitors are examining the Hercules instruments. Jane Okalebo, a Natural Resources graduate student, looked on from the right.

The group posed with Hercules, which is used in research to determine the health of plants, the likely yield of crops, and the amount of pigments such as chlorophyll contained in their leaves, all by observing reflected light —nondestructively, without touching the plants.

Photos by Bryan Leavitt