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 also passionate about teaching! I was the instructor (and helped develop the curriculum) for UW's graduate level Geospatial Data Analysis in Python class twice and the TA for it twice, and also twice TA'd the graduate level Advanced Surveying and Geomatics. While I still love snow research, I hope to eventually transition to a public high school teaching role.