José Antonio Sobrino, Professor of Earth Physics at the Universitat de València and recipient of the Jaume I Research Prize, has been awarded the Alejandro Malaspina National Research Prize in the field of Natural Resource Sciences and Technologies, as announced by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities on Thursday, 30 July.

Sobrino has received this prestigious award “for the excellence of his research career, the originality and innovation of his research, as well as his outstanding scientific leadership,” the Ministry said in a press release. The National Research Awards recognise ten Spanish researchers for their outstanding scientific careers, each endowed with a prize of 30.000 euros.

José Antonio Sobrino expressed his gratitude for the support his nomination received from researchers at NASA, the Universitat de València, the Universitat de Barcelona, among other institutions, and described the award as recognition of “an entire scientific career.” “I feel very happy, but I also feel a great sense of responsibility. Now we must continue and maintain the high standard of our work,” he said.

In this regard, he dedicated the National Research Award to the entire team at the Global Change Unit (UCG, its Spanish acronym) at the Universitat de València, a group he has led since 1994 and which has consolidated several research lines on the use of remote sensing for monitoring the planet, including evapotranspiration, the devastating impact of wildfires, urban heat islands, and Earth's surface temperature monitoring, among others. “These research lines use satellite data, but also the instrumentation available at the UCG, which enables us to carry out algorithm validation and satellite sensor calibration,” the UV researcher added.

José Antonio Sobrino is a physicist and director of the Global Change Unit and the Image Processing Laboratory (IPL) at the Universitat de València, specialising in the field of remote sensing. His research focuses on studying the changes affecting the planet through the use of remote-sensing satellites and the digital processing of the images they provide. He has published 350 papers in high-impact scientific journals; has been Principal Investigator (PI) on more than 80 research projects funded by Spain, the European Union (EU) and the European Space Agency (ESA), and has supervised 25 doctoral theses.

In 2019, he was awarded the Jaume I Research Prize in the Environmental Protection category for his research on global environmental changes and the development of algorithms to estimate the surface temperature of the Earth and the oceans.

He served as president of the Spanish Remote Sensing Association and is a member of the Advisory Group for the European Space Agency’s (ESA) LSTM mission, scheduled for launch in 2030, and of the scientific committee of the Franco-Indian TRISHNA mission, planned for launch in 2027. He is also the coordinator of the National Earth Observation Network (RNOT) and a Scientific Member of the High Advisory Council for Research, Development and Innovation of the Valencian Community, the body that advises the Regional Government on research, development and innovation; in addition, he is the founder of the Recent Advances in Quantitative Remote Sensing (RAQRS) symposium series  and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Recent Advances in Remote Sensing (RARS).