Soil Moisture

I develop the algorithms that read soil moisture from radar and radiometer measurements at L-band — the approach behind NASA’s SMAP mission, carried forward into the joint SMAP–NISAR algorithm, and extended to reflected navigation-satellite signals through CYGNSS, where I built JPL’s soil-moisture product.

Across these missions the through-line is the same: a soil-moisture value is only as trustworthy as the wave physics that links the measured signal to the water in the ground. Anchoring the retrieval to that physics — rather than to a curve fit — is what makes the product hold up where it matters.