- Date Of Birth: June 25, 1952
- Date Of Death: December 18, 2008
- State: Maryland
W. Wayne Newcomb, 56, of Burtonsville passed away on Thursday, December 18, 2008 at Laurel Regional Hospital after a 10 week battle of advanced cancer. He was born on June 25, 1952 to Russell and Martha Newcomb in Cambridge, MD. He grew up on a small farm in Golden Hill and attended local schools. Upon graduation from South Dorchester High School, Wayne pursued and received a degree in Agronomy at the University of Maryland. Wayne began working at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD in 1978, providing technical support to a branch exploring the new field of remotes sensing of the earth’s resources. This involved an A to Z program from instrument calibration and measurements to data processing and analysis. Mr. Newcomb was well served by his agricultural up-bringing and academic background as he was a natural liaison between NASA’s technical remotes sensing mission to study agricultural productivity and the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center’s field research studies that served as ground truth. He was instrumental in taking new measurements of agricultural crops and grasslands that was used to understand the early Landsat measurements. Such studies served to be the springboard for many new satellite data applications. His ever-expanding involvement enabled USDA agronomists, NASA scientists and engineers to collaborate on many new research activities. In the early 1980’s, Wayne helped develop a global scale satellite study of vegetation. Based on the techniques developed in the NASA-BARC investigations, Mr. Newcomb began applying them to global satellite images as part of the GIMMS program. This project became a foundation of NASA’s earth science research activities. Mr. Newcomb acquired and extracted data from tens of thousands of satellite tapes and provided field verification of the results from international field campaigns from Mongolia to West Africa. Mr. Newcomb was co-author on several highly cited scientific papers from this project. A third NASA career developed in the early 1990’s that took him from satellite research back to the ground to develop a network of ground-based observatories to monitor and study the influence of atmospheric particles on remotely sensed data and climate change. Wayne’s mature technical skills and practical approach for implementing new ideas were critical to the development and growth of the new project called AERONET. The project grew to be one of NASA’s great success stories in Earth Science as the program expanded to every continent and numerous islands totaling over 400 observatories. Mr.
