Research

My research centers around the broad topics of soil moisture remote sensing and data assimilation, and serves environmental assessment as well as agricultural production. Specifically, I have worked on the following aspects:

surface heat flux estimation
data assimilation of microwave and thermal data
crop modelling
agricultural data assimilation
wildfire risk

Heat Flux Estimation

Sensible and latent heat fluxes are costly to monitor and difficult to estimate. Since they are affected by surface thermal and wetness conditions, I developed a particle data assimilation framework to estimate fluxes, which assimilates SMAP soil moisture/brightness temperature and GOES land surface temperature.

Precision Agriculture

Crop modelling is an effective approach to simulating crop growth and predicting yield, but parameter calibration is often time-consuming. Under the assumption that phenology is similar among cultivars of the same crop, I developed a data assimilation framework that assimilates soil moisture and leaf area index data to estimate yield using an under-calibrated AquaCrop model.

Wildfire

Soil moisture has a direct influence on live fuel moisture content (LFMC), which affects wildfire behaviour, but previous research was limited to small regions and short records. By utilizing the ECV_SM data set and the NFMD data records, the soil moisture ~ LFMC relationship was evaluated at over 1,000 sites between 1979-2018.

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