“I’ve been a map geek since I was five years old,” Tim Minor is proud to tell you when asked about the source of his love for satellite imagery and remote sensing. Instead of asking “are we there yet?” from the back seat of the car on family vacations, Minor was busy navigating the trip.
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It’s all in the details. In this false color satellite image from space, vegetation appears bright red. The ASTER satellite shows Lake Tahoe in its entirety, inset image, while the blow-out image from the IKONOS satellite reveals details of the Incline Village shoreline visible down to individual cars at 1 meter resolution. |
Originally, he wanted to be a cartographer, or map maker, when he grew up, but the left-handed navigator struggled with tools all made for right-handed people. But as is evident when talking with him, Minor exudes energy and persistence in his personal and professional life—with his kids, with his projects at DRI and with his passion for running.
Believing he would follow in the footsteps of his grandfather, who in 1924 made it to the finals trials for the Olympics in the 100 meter dash, Minor thought he would be a sprinter, too. As he grew older, however, his smaller frame dictated against being a long-legged sprinter. But at age 15, he realized that instead, he could run long distances quite well and after graduating high school found himself running track and cross country for the University of Nevada, Reno. He made “All-American”—the top 15 in the nation—in college and continued to run after college in road races through his 20s and 30s.
His personal and professional love for the open road intersected in 1993 when he was headed to Ghana, West Africa. The associate geographic information systems and remote sensing scientist went to work with communities to find clean drinking water through remote sensing techniques as part of DRI’s work on the Ghana Rural Water Project. After two days on an airplane and with little sleep, Minor quickly immersed himself into the culture upon his arrival by participating in the 26.2-mile Accra Marathon in Accra, Ghana.
Most people start to slow down when they reach their 40s, but not Minor. In 1999, he joined a running team, the Reebok Aggies, to compete in national masters cross-country championships.
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Minor leads the pack during the Western Regional Cross Country Championships in 2001. He and his Reebok Aggie teammates won four national Masters Cross Country Team Championships from 1999 to 2002 and finished second in 2003. Minor won an individual national championship in 2001. |
“It was like starting all over again by joining a club. Ironically, all of us ran against each other in high school and now we were competing together again as a team,” Minor says. The team proved a powerful combination, winning four national championships from 1999 to 2002.
“The amazing thing about Tim is how humble or even nonchalant he is about winning,” says Michael Auerbach, executive director of the Division of Earth and Ecosystem Sciences. “When he came into work one day after competing in the national championships, I asked how he did. He said, ‘we did okay,’ not even mentioning they had won the whole thing!”
In the midst of their winning streak, the Aggies decided to challenge themselves with the ultimate test: breaking the world record for the masters 4x1 mile relay, and they did it—averaging four-minutes, 29-seconds per man.
Back at DRI, Minor has been making great strides in his fields of GIS and remote sensing. He supports several staff, adding his expertise to a variety of projects as well as taking on some larger projects on his own, including federal initiatives like the Yucca Mountain Project. At Yucca Mountain, Minor uses remote sensing to quantify disturbance features like footpaths and trucks and handles hyperspectral instruments to map the vegetation. His work also includes conducting satellite and airborne image processing to help characterize rock types in arid environments in order to develop dynamic models for predicting desert terrain conditions.
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Minor collects vegetation and soil reference spectra using a portable field spectrometer in the Mojave Desert near Kelso, Calif. |
Switching gears, he and his colleague Mary Cablk have just finished a wall-to-wall impervious cover map of the entire Lake Tahoe Basin for the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency using high-resolution satellite imagery.
Where does one learn the art of “extreme map-making?” For Minor, his big break came at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he earned his master’s degree in geography and worked on cutting-edge GIS/remote sensing projects. He then spent two years at Goddard Space Flight Center working for NASA on their new LANDSAT satellite system.
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Tim and Shannon, running mates and soul mates, enjoy a honeymoon in Maui. |
After logging 65,000 running miles on Earth and incalculable miles via satellite, Minor has finally slowed down just enough to catch his breath. This past summer he married a fellow runner and Aggie teammate, Shannon Sweeney. At home he cheers on daughter Emily, who runs track for Galena High School, and son Blake, who plays soccer for the Wonders Academy in Carson City.
At work, he trains graduate students, as well as Ghanaians in West Africa, to do remote sensing. If there’s one thing everyone can learn from Minor, it’s to be forever persistent in achieving one’s goals. His next goals lie in the years ahead—when he turns 50 that is, at which time he plans to break the five-minute mile and run in the National Cross Country Championships again.
Those who know him have no doubt he will achieve that goal, too, and predict he will just take it all in stride.
–Heather Emmons
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