MANILA, Philippines—When United States-based physicist Dr. Josefino Comiso arrived in Manila in 1981, the airport immigration officer who checked his passport said with undisguised awe: “S--t, NASA is sending a scientist and a Filipino at that.”
Comiso is a Filipino senior research scientist at the Cryospheric Sciences branch of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) at the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), a space research laboratory in Greenbelt, Maryland.
The cryosphere, simply put, refers to the frozen region of the earth.
A contributing author to the 2007 report on climate change of the Nobel Prize winner Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change, Comiso returned home this month to work with the academe upon the invitation of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST).
He is among a growing number of Filipino scientists who are taking time off from their jobs in the United States, Europe and other parts of Asia to share their expertise with public or private institutions under the DOST’s Balik-Scientist Program.
Pioneering program
From Sept. 7 to 15, he facilitated a conference on global warming, climate change and the state of forestry in the country at the University of the Philippines in Los Baños (UPLB) in Laguna.
“This is a pioneering program. We brought in experts on climate programs so we can discuss what kind of climate change we’re experiencing,” Comiso told reporters after a press conference last Friday.
Climate change
But more importantly, Comiso said he would draw up a program to monitor climate change in the country in collaboration with UPLB, his host institution in the DOST program.
To do the job, he would team up with Dr. Vicky Espaldon, dean of the UPLB School of Environmental Science and Management and use satellite data, including those collected by the country’s weather bureau for the past 30 years.
This, he said, would be a collaborative work between NASA and UPLB.
“We’ll put together a data set of climate parameters in the Philippines so we will know for sure how our natural resources are changing as a function of time and which areas are being threatened,” Comiso said.
36 scientists
During the press conference at the weather bureau, Comiso, now 61, said the Philippines would be “one of the biggest victims” of climate change because it is home to a high diversity of species.
He echoed observations by experts that the country was vulnerable to sea level rise and powerful storms as an offshoot of a warmer climate.
After being in the “doldrums” for some time, the DOST’s Balik-Scientist Program got a new lease of life since more expatriate Filipinos were signing up, said Science and Technology Secretary Estrella Alabastro.
Sharing expertise
“This is an unusual year. We usually have two or three scientists each year. This time, we have 36. That’s quite a big jump,” she said at the conference.
Also in the country are theoretical physicist Amador Muriel, operations research expert Guillermo Mendoza, structural engineer Roberto Legaspi, physicist Danilo Romero and medical specialist Edsel Salvana, among others.
The scientists are either doing lectures or conducting joint researches with students of UPLB, University of the Philippines in Diliman, Quezon City and in Manila and De la Salle University.
Over the years, these visits have “accelerated” the progress of graduate students in research work and have paved the way for tie-ups between the scientists’ institutions and local universities, Alabastro said.
“I’m sure a lot of young people will benefit from your visit,” she told the scientists.
The Balik-Scientist Program encourages Filipino experts residing abroad to come home and share their expertise to boost the scientific, agro-industrial and economic development in the country in exchange for some incentives.
It could last from one month to three years, depending on the expatriate’s availability.
Arctic experience
Comiso, whose 25-year-long research on climate change has taken him to the Arctic and whose paper correctly predicted the decline of polar ice caps, said he started an initial study on climate parameters in the Philippines with a Filipino graduate student years ago.
“Through a program, I got a Filipino student to get her Ph.D. at NASA’s GSFC. We started on a project to look at some of the parameters,” he said.
This, he said, would be the takeoff point for his collaborative research with UPLB on climate change.
“We hope we can build a program in which we can identify the problems confronted by Filipinos as we start experiencing a warming climate,” he said.
World-class
After completing a degree in BS Physics at UP Diliman in 1962, Comiso worked at the Philippine Atomic Research Center in Quezon City and later taught at UP.
A few years later, he obtained his master’s degree in Physics at the Florida State University in 1966, and a Ph.D. in Physics at the University of California in 1972.
He worked for a year as assistant research physicist at the University of California, and later as research associate at the University of Virginia for four years before moving to NASA in the late ’70s.
“I’m glad the DOST has recognized that Filipinos are just as good as anybody around the world,” Comiso said. “We can compete with the world’s best. We’re able to show that we, as a country, can aspire to be as good as any country in the world.”
