Joseph Maina, research associate at Wildlife Conservation Society’s Coral Reef Conservation Project in Mombasa (Kenya), has received a Fellowship Award from POGO-SCOR (Partnership for Observation of the Global Oceans - Scientific Committee for Oceanic Research) for training in Coastal Altimetry in support of ALTICORE-Africa, under the supervision of Dr. Paolo Cipollini, NOCS, United Kingdom. 

Joseph Maina takes a MSc. Geo-information Science and Earth Observation for Environmental Modelling and Management (www.gem-msc.org), offered jointly by Universities of Southampton, UK; Lund, Sweden; Warsaw, Poland; and International Institute for Geo-information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), The Netherlands.  He has been involved in a range of coastal issues, e.g., as consultant for the Regional Programme for the Sustainable Management of the Coastal Zone of the Countries of the Indian Ocean (ReCoMaP-IOC) and for WWF/CI to assess climate change vulnerability for coastal and marine systems in Madagascar using GIS, Remote sensing and modelling tools. He has also lectured at International Institute for Geo-information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), The Netherlands on applications of GIS and Remote Sensing in Integrated Coastal Zone Management, Dakar, Senegal. 

During the three month staying at NOCS since August 2008, he will gain confidence with BRAT (Basic Radar Altimetry Toolbox which is a brand-new tool supported by the European Space Agency to use radar altimetry data) and some MATLAB tutorials. After getting basics of altimetry, he will move to process some along-track data from RADS archives on the Eastern African coasts, with major emphasis on the Agulhas region. The aim is to provide a better estimate of the current transport in the last 15 years compared to those available from standard AVISO products (see here from estimates computed by Gustavo Goni).