Don Cahoon

Don Cahoon brings more than three decades of experience in remote sensing, data analytics, software engineering, cybersecurity, and advanced technology to Salus Solutions. He spent a significant part of his career at NASA Langley Research Center, where he worked in atmospheric science and became an expert in using satellite data to understand events occurring across vast areas of the Earth. His research has used satellite imagery to detect and map wildland fires, measure burned areas, study smoke and atmospheric effects, and turn millions of observations into information scientists and decision-makers can use.

Cahoon's wildfire research has covered continents and decades. He was lead author of research published in Nature that used nighttime satellite imagery to map the seasonal movement of fires across the African continent. He later helped analyze the severe 1987 forest fires in northern China and southeastern Siberia using satellite observations. His work contributed to the development of methods for detecting wildland fire from space and to the broader scientific understanding of how large fires affect forests, atmospheric chemistry, carbon emissions, and climate.

That work continues today. In 2025, Cahoon led a new study reconstructing wildfire activity across Asian Russia from 1979 through 2000 using NOAA AVHRR satellite data. The research created the first validated long-term historical burned-area dataset of its kind for the region. It found an average of approximately 4.8 million hectares burned each year, with individual years ranging from 0.4 million to 11.9 million hectares—providing scientists with a stronger baseline for understanding how wildfire, weather, vegetation, carbon, and climate are changing across the boreal Arctic. The paper lists Cahoon's affiliation as Salus Solutions.

Cahoon also brings extensive software and cybersecurity experience, including engineering leadership at Symantec. At Salus, he applies that unusual combination of science and technology to complex operational problems. He oversees technology, cybersecurity, data integration, analytics, and visualization, helping turn large and difficult datasets into clear operational pictures leaders can understand and use.

His work follows a simple principle: collect the data, find the pattern, show what matters, and give leaders the information to act.