Helfert, Michael R.

Geographer and climatologist; program director for Regional and State Climate Programs at the National Climatic Data Center.

Michael R. Helfert, a geographer and climatologist, has served as Program Director for Regional and State Climate Programs at the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, NC since 2002. He has also worked as the South Carolina State climatologist and as the Director of the Southeast Regional Climate Center. Prior to that, he worked as a senior scientist at NASA's Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center from 1985 through 1994, developing scientific mission profiles for Space Shuttle missions and providing pre-flight and post-flight briefings for both American and foreign astronauts. He retired from NASA in 1994 and, as was common practice, took his working materials, film, and slides when he moved on. Helfert continues to provide astronaut-cosmonaut briefings and collaborates with NASA's Johnson Space Center (Houston) as a Science Investigator for Global Change.

Helfert has worked and published in the field of global geographic analysis since 1961. Data sources used during the past 38 years include photography and imagery from the ground, aircraft, various unmanned satellites and from American and Russian manned space missions. Three decades of work on systematic, scientific photography of the Earth from space culminated in the 1996 National Geographic Society book Orbit: NASA Astronauts Photograph the Earth by Jay Apt, Helfert and Justin Wilkinson.

Helfert earned his B.A. and Ph.D. in geography at the University of Texas.