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Mariette Vreugdenhil

Research Interests

• Soil moisture microwave remote sensing
• Climate change
• Understanding scatterometer backscatter over arid and semi-arid regions

Mariette’s principle research interests focus on the application of microwave remote sensing observations to monitor vegetation and soil moisture dynamics. She is experienced with hydrological fieldwork, i.e. installing and maintaining an in situ soil moisture network and regular vegetation sampling. She combines remote sensing with her background in earth sciences to retrieve biophysical variables from backscatter observations from scatterometers and synthetic aperture radars.
Upon graduating, Mariette continues her research as a Post-Doc researcher at the research group Remote Sensing within the Department of Geodesy and Geoinformation at TU Wien. Her research focuses on the use of Metop ASCAT and Sentinel-1 to retrieve high resolution vegetation variables.

 

Key Facts

Mariette received her PhD degree in remote sensing with honors from Vienna Universtiy of Technology (TU Wien) as part of the Doctoral Programme on Water Resource Systems. In support of her PhD she worked as a project-assistant in the research group Remote Sensing at the Department of Geodesy and Geoinformation at the TU Wien. During her PhD thesis, “Assessing vegetation dynamics from space borne active microwave backscatter observations”, she developed and validated a new vegetation water content product from backscatter observations. As part of her PhD studies she visited the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for several months.
Mariette received the M.Sc. degree in Earth Sciences from the VU University Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She specialized in climate change, geo-ecosystems, remote sensing and Geographic information systems. The topic of her thesis was “Identification of clay pans from AMSR-E passive microwave observations”. This research also included participation in a calibration and validation campaign for the European Space Agency's (ESA) Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) satellite in Australia.