VIIRS Nighttime Earth Composite
Feng-Chi (David) Hsu
Remote Sensing • Cloud Architecture • Full-Stack

Feng-Chi (David) Hsu

Senior engineer building at the intersection of satellite remote sensing, geospatial data engineering, and cloud-native platforms. From raw orbital data to production web applications.

The Full Stack of Earth Observation

My career traces the complete path from satellite sensor physics to production web platforms — calibrating raw orbital data, architecting near-real-time processing pipelines, designing cloud infrastructure, and building the frontends where users interact with geospatial intelligence.

At CIRES (University of Colorado Boulder) and Colorado School of Mines, I spent eight years building production pipelines for VIIRS and DMSP satellite imagery, developing radiometric calibration algorithms, worked on Nightfire gas flare detection effort that supported the World Bank's global carbon tracking, and monitoring fishing vessel for IUU activities.

At National Laboratory of the Rockies, I scaled that foundation — architecting AWS cloud platforms, building web applications with serverless architecture, and managed data repositories for cross-displine research teams.

Location
Boulder, CO
Education
Ph.D., University of Tokyo
Materials Engineering
Certifications
AWS DevOps Engineer & Solutions Architect
Cisco CCNA
Languages
Mandarin • English • Japanese
Trilingual — native and professional level

Across the Geospatial Data Stack

🛰
Remote Sensing
EO/IR/SAR DMSP SNPP NOAA-20 Landsat MODIS Sentinel-1 AERONET
🌍
Geospatial Stack
GDAL Rasterio GeoPandas PostGIS GeoParquet Leaflet Mapbox QGIS ENVI ArcGIS
⚙️
Data Engineering
PostgreSQL DuckDB Kafka dbt parquet Snowflake Druid
☁️
AWS Cloud
Lambda ECS S3 DynamoDB OpenSearch CDK Cognito API Gateway EC2 ALB Route53
💻
Full-Stack Dev
React TypeScript Node.js FastAPI REST APIs JQuery Bootstrap
🔧
DevOps
Docker Kubernetes GitHub Actions AWS CDK Datadog Slurm
🧠
ML & AI
scikit-learn LangChain Geostatistics Time Series Analysis Geospatial Classification LangChain ag2

Career Arc

Jun 2022 — Feb 2026
Full-Stack Software Engineer — Cloud Data Platforms
National Laboratory of the Rockies — Golden, CO
  • Front End React, Node.js, TypeScript
  • Back End JavaScript, Python, REST API
  • AWS DynamoDB, OpenSearch, Cognito, CodeBuild, CloudWatch, Route53, ALB, EC2, Fargate
  • Data Engineering Kafka, Druid, Snowflake, CKAN
  • DevOps Docker, CI/CD, IaC, Nginx, K8S
Jan 2020 — May 2022
Research Associate — Geospatial Data Pipeline Engineering
Colorado School of Mines — Golden, CO
  • NRT Pipeline Large volumn EO/IR data ingestion, ETL, HPC, IDL
  • GIS Processing/Visualization GDAL, PostGIS, OSGeo, QGIS, ArcGIS Online, ArcGIS Enterprise, ArcGIS Pro
  • Remote Sensing Nocturnal EO/IR observation, thermal anomaly detection (gas flare, wild fire), fishing activity monitoring (IUU)
  • Web development node.js, Angular, Bootstrap, Jquery, leaflet, Mapbox
  • SysAdmin/DevOps Linux, Postgres, Keycloak, Apache, Slurm
May 2012 — Dec 2019
Associate Researcher — Remote Sensing Data Science
University of Colorado Boulder (CIRES) — Boulder, CO
  • Remote Sensing VIIRS, DMSP, radiometric calibration, atmospheric correction (MODTRAN, AERONET), radiative transfer modeling
  • Nightfire Thermal anomaly (gas flare and wildfire) detection
  • Maritime IUU activity detection and tracking
  • Data Science Python, GDAL, Rasterio, IDL, time series analysis
  • Visualization Leaflet, Mapbox, QGIS, PhotoShop
  • Orbital Dynmics SGP4, TLE

Featured Work

Selected Research

Why VIIRS data are superior to DMSP for mapping nighttime lights
CD Elvidge, KE Baugh, M Zhizhin, FC Hsu
Proceedings of the Asia-Pacific Advanced Network 35 (0), 62
2013
941 cited
Annual time series of global VIIRS nighttime lights derived from monthly averages: 2012 to 2019
CD Elvidge, M Zhizhin, T Ghosh, FC Hsu, J Taneja
Remote Sensing 13 (5), 922
2021
681 cited
VIIRS Nightfire: Satellite pyrometry at night
CD Elvidge, M Zhizhin, FC Hsu, KE Baugh
Remote Sensing 5 (9), 4423-4449
2013
373 cited
Nighttime lights compositing using the VIIRS day-night band: Preliminary results
K Baugh, FC Hsu, CD Elvidge, M Zhizhin
Proceedings of the Asia-Pacific Advanced Network 35 (0), 70-86
2013
182 cited
The dimming of lights in China during the COVID-19 pandemic
CD Elvidge, T Ghosh, FC Hsu, M Zhizhin, M Bazilian
Remote Sensing 12 (17), 2851
2020
119 cited
Methods used for the 2006 radiance lights
D Ziskin, K Baugh, FC Hsu, T Ghosh, C Elvidge
Proceedings of the Asia-Pacific Advanced Network 30 (0), 131
2010
105 cited
Cross-matching VIIRS boat detections with vessel monitoring system tracks in Indonesia
FC Hsu, CD Elvidge, K Baugh, M Zhizhin, T Ghosh, D Kroodsma, ...
Remote Sensing 11 (9), 995
2019
93 cited
Improving accuracy of economic estimations with VIIRS DNB image products
N Zhao, FC Hsu, G Cao, EL Samson
Remote Sensing of Night-time Light, 45-64
2021
75 cited
Extending nighttime combustion source detection limits with short wavelength VIIRS data
CD Elvidge, M Zhizhin, K Baugh, FC Hsu, T Ghosh
Remote Sensing 11 (4), 395
2019
74 cited
Extending the DMSP nighttime lights time series beyond 2013
T Ghosh, KE Baugh, CD Elvidge, M Zhizhin, A Poyda, FC Hsu
Remote Sensing 13 (24), 5004
2021
70 cited
Indicators of electric power instability from satellite observed nighttime lights
CD Elvidge, FC Hsu, M Zhizhin, T Ghosh, J Taneja, M Bazilian
Remote Sensing 12 (19), 3194
2020
67 cited
Exploring and estimating in-use steel stocks in civil engineering and buildings from night-time lights
FC Hsu, CD Elvidge, Y Matsuno
International Journal of Remote Sensing 34 (2), 490-504
2013
56 cited
Frozen out in Texas: blackouts and inequity
J Carvallo, FC Hsu, Z Shah, J Taneja
The Rockefeller Foundation
2021
52 cited
Fifty years of nightly global low-light imaging satellite observations
CD Elvidge, K Baugh, T Ghosh, M Zhizhin, FC Hsu, T Sparks, M Bazilian, ...
Frontiers in Remote Sensing 3, 919937
2022
39 cited

Foundation

Education
Ph.D., Materials Engineering
University of Tokyo
Thesis defended in Japanese. DMSP nighttime light data for urban mineral reserve estimation.
M.S., Environmental Engineering
National Cheng Kung University
B.S., Environmental Engineering
National Cheng Kung University
Certifications
AWS
DevOps Engineer – Pro
Amazon Web Services
AWS
Solutions Architect – Assoc
Amazon Web Services
CCNA
Network Associate
Cisco
Languages
Mandarin
Native
English
Professional
Japanese
Professional

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