A former University of Hawaii- Manoa scientist is leading a NASA-funded, $15 million project that aims to take the study of coral reefs to whole new heights.

Eric J. Hochberg, now an associate scientist at the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences, is back on Oahu this week to kick off the three-year Coral Reef Airborne Laboratory, or CORAL, study.

Hochberg and his team are conducting an operational readiness test in Kaneohe Bay at UH’s Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology on Coconut Island.

Over the next year the CORAL field expedition will survey more reefs than ever before — from Hawaii to Australia — using state-of-the-art technology both in the air and in the water. The following two years will be set aside for analyzing the vast amount of data.

“This is fantastic,” Hochberg said Thursday during a tour of UH’s Coconut Island facilities, which will serve as the Hawaii home for the study. “I’m excited.”

Hochberg, who earned his master’s degree at UH in 1998 and his doctorate in oceanography at UH in 2002, said he’s been trying to launch a similar ecosystemwide project since he was a student at UH.

The problem, he said, is that it’s expensive. “If it wasn’t expensive it would have been done a long time ago,” he said.

Now, with a growing number of coral reefs around the globe ailing from environmental stresses such as sea level change, rising ocean temperatures and pollution, his pitch to NASA for funding found resonance.

“It’s in the public consciousness,” Hochberg said of the planet’s troubled reefs. “It’s in the news and that makes it more compelling. This is something the public cares about.”

UP UNTIL NOW, he said, coral scientists have largely focused on only parts of the reef — the parts they can get to. For decades scuba diving has been the way most scientists have conducted reef research, but that, he said, hasn’t produced enough data to offer a complete picture.

“There’s a lot about reefs we don’t know,” he said. “The reef is huge — it’s an ecosystem, and I think we have a serious gap in our knowledge. People aren’t studying reefs at the scale of a reef.”

Only 0.1 percent of the world’s coral reefs have been studied to date, Hochberg said. With CORAL, 3 percent to 4 percent of the reefs will be brought under the scientific spotlight.

“We’re trying to see the forest, not the trees,” he said. “We’ll be looking at patterns that we now do at small scale.”

Hochberg’s team will examine the condition of reef systems in Hawaii, Palau, the Mariana Islands and Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

The reefs in the main Hawaiian Islands will be surveyed from Feb. 1 to March 15. The Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, one of 12 research institutions in CORAL, is hosting experiments in support of the mission and will serve as the base for operations and staging.

Hochberg said that when he was planning the project, he knew he had to work from the well-equipped facilities at Coconut Island.

“There’s very few places in the world where there is a marine lab right here on the water,” he said.

The heart of the project is a new instrument called PRISM (Portable Remote Imaging Spectrometer), developed and managed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

Mounted in the belly of a Gulfstream IV aircraft that flies at 28,000 feet, below commercial aircraft, PRISM will scan the ocean and record the light reflected upward from the water below.

PRISM will be able to see objects below, about 5 by 5 feet square, and its spectral resolution will be able to identify what a reef is made of — coral, algae and sand — without having to go underwater in each location.

“An airplane can cover the whole of Kaneohe Bay in two passes,” Hochberg said. “What would take researchers months and months of diving will take five minutes in an airplane.”

But while data are being collected from up above, simultaneous in-water measurements will be taken to validate the airborne measurements.

SCIENTISTS SAID the study should produce the most complete view of the condition of the world’s coral reefs to date, offering insights into how natural and man-made influences affect the reef ecosystems and allowing researchers to better predict the future of the global ecosystem.

“I don’t know what kind of patterns we will find,” Hochberg said. Chances are, he said, the results won’t be the black-and-white answers many are hoping for. Rather, the data will provide more nuanced information.

“These are complex ecosystems,” he said.

Hochberg said the future of this type of surveying is likely found in satellites, which will be able to use the PRISM technology to cover much more ground and in a much more economical way.

There’s even a potential that satellites will be able to survey 100 percent of the world’s coral reefs — and survey rainforests and other ecosystems as well.