Rate My Professor Robert Loughman

Robert P. Loughman serves as Department Chair and Associate Professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at Hampton University. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics with a minor in Mathematics from the College of William and Mary in 1993. He then attended the University of Arizona, where he received a Master of Science degree in Atmospheric Science in 1995 and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Atmospheric Sciences in 1998. Following his doctoral studies, Loughman held a postdoctoral Research Associateship at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center before joining the Hampton University faculty.

Loughman's research efforts focus on improving understanding of the Earth-atmosphere system through analysis of remote sensing data. He develops tools to model radiative transfer more efficiently and accurately, extends knowledge of Earth-atmosphere physics to identify promising measurement strategies, and creates methods to forecast retrieval system performance using measured data. His primary research involves retrieval of aerosol properties and ozone concentrations from solar radiation scattered by the limb of the atmosphere, employing space-borne limb scattering sensors including SOLSE/LORE, SAGE III (Meteor-3M), OSIRIS, SCIAMACHY, and OMPS Limb Profiler. A particular emphasis lies in reconciling remote sensing aerosol measurements with in-situ observations. At Hampton University, he has developed undergraduate and graduate courses in Atmospheric Physics, Atmospheric Radiative Transfer, and Atmospheric Measurements. Key publications include "Tracking the 2022 Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai aerosol cloud in the upper and middle stratosphere using space-based observations" (submitted to Geophys. Res. Letters, 2022), "Systematic comparison of vectorial spherical radiative transfer models in limb scattering geometry" (Atmos. Meas. Tech., 2021), "Simultaneous Aerosol and Ocean Properties From the PolCube CubeSat Polarimeter" (Frontiers in Remote Sensing, 2021), "OMPS LP Version 2.0 Multi-wavelength Aerosol Extinction Coefficient Retrieval Algorithm" (Atmos. Meas. Tech. Discuss., 2020), "Evaluation of the OMPS/LP stratospheric aerosol extinction product using SAGE III/ISS observations" (Atmos. Meas. Tech., 2020), and "A comparison of lognormal and gamma size distributions for characterizing the stratospheric aerosol phase function" (Atmos. Meas. Tech., 2020). His contributions support NASA atmospheric science missions and have accumulated over 375 citations.