Javier Peralta

Javier Peralta got graduated in Physics at the University of La Laguna (Spain) in 2003, specializing in the fields of Astrophysics and Applied Physics. During 2004, he participated in a study of the NO+ NLTE emissions from the upper atmosphere of the Earth by using high-resolution spectra taken by the instrument EnviSat/MIPAS, a task undertaken in the Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia (IAA/CSIC) and whose results were published. In 2009, he obtained a PhD degree in Physics at the University of the Basque Country (Spain) with the highest qualification ("Cum Laude") and the mention "Doctor Europeus". His PhD research, supervised by the Professors Agustín Sánchez-Lavega and Ricardo Hueso, lasted 4 years and it focused on the atmospheric dynamics of the planet Venus using data from the spatial missions Galileo and Venus Express. Among his accomplishments, the improvement of the software PLIA to navigate and process planetary data, the measurement and analysis of the winds at different altitudes of the cloud region in Venus using remote sensing images, the study of the atmospheric turbulence at the cloud tops of Venus, and the detection and characterization of mesoscale waves at different altitudes of the cloud region. As a result, 6 articles were published in international peer review journals (4 of them as first author), along with more than 80 citations which allowed him to be awarded in 2012 with the Extraordinary Prize of Doctorate granted by the University of the Basque Country. After the PhD, he got involved in four postdoctoral stages: two of them at IAA/CSIC in Granada (Spain), 3 years at the Astronomical Observatory of Lisbon (CAAUL/OAL) in Lisbon (Portugal), and several months at the Max Planck Institute of Solar System Research (MPG/MPS) in Katlenburg-Lindau (Germany). The varied work during these stages implied a total of 10 published articles (4 of them as first author): they include two Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series (first author), a Nature Geoscience (co-author) and one in Geophysical Research Letters that was the cover (Year 2015, Vol. 42, Issue 3) and was highlighted in Science Editor's Choice. In the field of the atmospheric dynamics, Javier Peralta has worked in a wide variety of topics, from the measurement of atmospheric winds and their variability, to the characterization of the turbulence and the wave activity that manifests on the clouds’ albedo and opacity, as well as on the winds and temperatures. He also deduced -for the first time- the analytical solutions for the waves in planets with atmospheric superrotation (cyclostrophic regimes), and successfully applied this theory to the equatorial region of Venus in order to obtain a Kelvin-type wave which satisfactorily explains the Y-feature of Venus. In addition to the atmospheric dynamics, he collaborated in other works closer to the field of atmospheric radiation, mainly the non-LTE infrared emissions from the upper atmospheres of the Earth and Venus, as well as the drastic electronic changes apparent in the ionosphere of Mars, or the simultaneous measurement of winds via cloud tracking and the Doppler shift in the solar Fraunhofer lines from the cloud tops of Venus. Javier Peralta also has experience working with remote sensing data from cameras (Galileo/SSI, VEx/VMC), spectrometers (VEx/VIRTIS-H, VEx/SOIR) and visual spectrometers (VEx/VIRTIS-M), as well as designing software to manage huge amounts of data and process them. Moreover, he acquired experience with NAIF navigation routines for SPICE kernels, and has a long-experience background in programming with IDL.