Eric Gagliano

About

I'm a postdoctoral researcher at UW CEE's Terrain Analysis and Cryosphere Observation Lab, with a research focus on understanding when and where mountain snowmelt occurs — a critical question for the more than one billion people who depend on seasonal snowpack for freshwater. I graduated from UW with my PhD in December 2025, and my dissertation work combined satellite radar remote sensing with large-scale cloud computing to produce the first global, high-resolution record of snowmelt runoff onset timing, processing ~3.9 million Sentinel-1 C-band SAR scenes at 80-meter resolution from 2015 to 2024. This dataset enabled a systematic analysis of elevation, aspect, and temperature controls on snowmelt timing patterns across ~150 mountain ranges.

As a postdoc, I'm continuing to work on snowmelt phase delineation and wet snow detection, and I'm developing and evaluating snowmelt methods that leverage data from NASA's newly launched NISAR L-band SAR mission. I'm also building scalable, automatically-updating geospatial data pipelines using emerging tools like Icechunk and GitHub Actions. Alongside research, I develop and maintain open-source Python tools to make snow-related geospatial datasets more accessible to the broader community. I'm passionate about teaching — I've taught UW's graduate Geospatial Data Analysis in Python (CEE 467/CEWA 567) twice and TA'd often — and hope to eventually transition to a public high school teaching role.