Freeze–Thaw

I work on detecting whether the land surface is frozen or thawed — the signal that marks the onset of spring and the timing of frost across the landscape. Frozen ground scatters microwaves very differently from thawed ground, which makes the transition legible from orbit.

This thread began with the Aquarius mission and grew into an operational SMAP freeze–thaw science product — one of the clearest cases where a piece of wave physics becomes a number people rely on, season after season.