Clean water is vital for life on Earth, but humans are drastically altering water quality in our rivers, lakes, and reservoirs. Activities such as deforestation, dam building, and urbanization can greatly impair water quality, causing harm to plant and animal ecosystems and human communities on a global scale.
Satellite remote sensing offers a unique perspective into the extent and rates at which we are altering Earth’s water. Using satellites, we can track the quantity of water moving across Earth’s surface as well as various aspects of water quality, including sediment load, algae, and water temperature.
My research interests concern how we can use satellite remote sensing to study surface water in novel and innovative ways. My dissertation projects included quantifying the optimal satellite mission requirements to observe total suspended solids in rivers, exploring potential applications of the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite in the field of fluvial geomorphology, and investigating the capacity of the ICESat-2 satellite to estimate turbidity in inland waters.
Currently, I am working at the Center for Ecosystem Forecasting at Virginia Tech as a Postdoctoral Associate. My current research project aims to incorporate satellite remote sensing data into a near-term iterative forecasting model (FLARE; Forecasting Lake and Reservoir Ecosystems) to improve scalability in waterbodies with little to no in situ data.