About Us

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Sapphire Geoscience Informatics provides information and tools for making more informed decisions about the environment and its resources.

We are committed to promoting a more sustainable future in the specific areas of water resources, energy technology, waste reduction and climate change by providing mobile apps that address environmental education and by providing quantitative analysis and statistical training services to businesses working with environmental data in Northeast Ohio.

Our experience includes:

  • Over 25 years working with large and multivariate environmental datasets
  • Expertise with a variety of statistical and data visualization software packages, including IDL, Matlab, SPSS, JMP and Excel
  • Service as a quantitative analysis consultant on projects involving a wide variety of environmental problems
  • Over a decade of experience as a university instructor of quantitative analysis courses, including Scientific Methods in Geology (for undergraduates and Masters students) and Advanced Geologic Data Analysis (for Masters and Ph.D. students)

We have worked many different types of environmental data:

  • Meteorological, oceanographic and climatological data, including observations of the Great Lakes and rivers
  • Water and soil quality data, including measurements of environmental contaminants
  • Output from computational fluid dynamic models, including climate models and simulations of real-world environments
  • Data from earth-orbiting satellites that carry environmental sensors
  • Earth imagery data, including Landsat, MODIS, MERIS and SeaWiFS observations

Donna L. Witter, Ph.D., Owner and Chief Project Director of Sapphire Geoscience Informatics LLC, specializes in quantitative analysis of environmental datasets and in educational presentations of environmental data. Dr. Witter received a Ph.D. in physical oceanography from Oregon State University, and then completed a postdoctoral appointment and served as an Associate Research Scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. She has also served as a member of the Faculty in the Department of Geology at Kent State University.