Manuela Girotto

Manuela Girotto

PhD - Assistant Professor
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I am a civil and environmental engineer whose work merges cutting-edge space technology and remotely-sensed observations of the earth with state-of-the-art models for the purpose of improving our scientific knowledge about variability and change in hydrologic cycles. In particular, my research focuses on snow, soil moisture, and groundwater hydrology. I have developed remote sensing data assimilation techniques to construct a snow reanalysis dataset that characterized the availability and magnitude of snow in the Sierra Nevada in California. I have also merged satellite observations from a NASA gravity mission (which is sensitive to groundwater levels) and soil moisture mission within land surface and climate models for the purpose of improving estimates of the soil moisture profile, which is a key variable for understanding and predicting weather, biogeochemical dynamics, and environmental and economical hazards such as droughts and floods. After earning my PhD in civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles, I have worked as a research scientist in the earth science division of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD.

 

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