Mike Hardesty has had an extended and productive career as a lidar researcher spanning nearly 40 years. Currently he is a Senior Research Scientist and Associate Director for Environmental Modeling, Observations and Forecasting with the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, where he is also a Fellow. Prior to this, he led the Optical Remote Sensing group at NOAA in Boulder, Colorado for more than two decades. Throughout his career, Dr. Hardesty has been a leader in the development and application of coherent lidar for wind sensing. He developed much of the original theory on optimizing estimation of Doppler shifts from coherent lidar returns, and also demonstrated the first coherent DIAL measurements of water vapor using pulsed coherent lidar. He led the effort at NOAA to deploy a high energy pulsed coherent lidar on an aircraft and, in collaboration with scientists from NASA obtained the first measurements of winds in the eye of a hurricane. Under his leadership, the NOAA group initiated innovative research directions over a wide variety of lidar-related topics associated with wind, water vapor, ozone, aerosol characterization, and synergisms with other active and passive remote sensing instruments. Notable accomplishments have included first ship-based Doppler measurements of winds over the ocean, first long-term (1-year) deployment of an unattended ship-based lidar in the arctic for aerosol/cloud measurements, first airborne deployment of a UV solid-state laser for airborne ozone measurements, first demonstration of ozone fluxes combining DIAL and Doppler lidars, and first demonstration of an unattended water vapor profiling lidar. He is currently focusing on deployment of lidar for space-based wind measurements, and is working to demonstrate a new direct-detection technique suitable for full atmospheric profiling.

Dr. Hardesty has authored or co-authored more than 100 scientific papers, mostly on lidar-related topics, and has presented more than 30 invited papers on active remote sensing at international symposia on multiple continents He has been a NATO Fellow at the University of Hull, England and Visiting Scientist at the Laboratoire de Meteorologie Dynamique, France, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. During 2005 he spent a semester as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Electrical Engineering working with the atmospheric lidar group at the City College of New York in Manhattan. He is a recipient of the NOAA Distinguished Career Award and the International Radiation Commission Coordinating Committee on Laser Atmospheric Studies (IRC/ICLAS) Lifetime Achievement Award

Dr. Hardesty received the B.S. degree in 1971 from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and the M.S. degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1972, both in Electrical Engineering. In 1984 he received the Ph.D. from the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA, in Electrical Engineering (Optics and Meteorology).

Dr. Hardesty is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America (OSA) and a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society (AMS), where he served on the AMS Council and Executive Committee. He is also a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the American Geophysical Union. He has served as Chief Editor of the AMS Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology and previously served as Associate Editor for OSA’s Applied Optics journal specializing in Atmospheric and Ocean Optics. He is or has been a member of several science teams and institutional review panels focusing on lidar-related topics for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Department of Energy, and the National Science Foundation, and the European Space Agency. Previously, he has been a member of the IRC/ICLAS), the AMS Committee on Laser Atmospheric Studies, and the Administrative Committee of the Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society of the IEEE. He currently is co-chair of the multi-agency Working Group on Space-based Lidar Winds, and a member of the ESA Aeolus Science Advisory Group.

During his career, Dr. Hardesty mentored or hosted as visitors many prominent lidar scientists, including Alan Brewer, Christoph Senff, Guy Pearson, Martin Platt, Alain Dabas, Andreas Fix, Rob Newsum, and Aniceto Belmonte. Notable among his many research collaborations have been joint research projects with JPL, Goddard Space Flight Center, Langley Research Center, NCAR, NIST, the Naval Research Laboratory, CNRS, DLR, the Max-Planck-Institut für Meteorologie, UMBC, the City College of New York, Hull the University of Colorado, the University of Oklahoma, Penn State University, and Ball Aerospace.