Snow (SWE)

For more than a decade I’ve worked on estimating how much water a snowpack holds — its snow water equivalent — from radar. More recent work uses the phase of radar signals across repeat passes (InSAR) to track seasonal snow.

What ties the old and new threads together is the physics of how a microwave behaves once it enters a snowpack: scattering among the grains, bouncing between layers, and emerging carrying a record of the snow it passed through. Reading that record correctly is the hard part — and the part I model from first principles.