Rate My Professor Susan Steele-Dunne

Prof. Susan Steele-Dunne is a professor in the Department of Geoscience and Remote Sensing in the Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences at Delft University of Technology. She leads the M-WAVE research group, dedicated to advancing microwave remote sensing techniques for monitoring vegetation water dynamics and their roles in water, energy, and carbon cycles. Her research integrates field-based and spaceborne observations with modeling, data assimilation, and machine learning to study processes from local scales to global ecosystems, with applications in agricultural monitoring, drought assessment, and vegetation health evaluation. Key developments include the TU Delft GNSS transmissivity network for L-band attenuation in forests, the SLAINTE satellite mission concept for frequent vegetation observations, the ASCAT slope vegetation product, and the Agricultural Sandbox NL database of Sentinel-1 data for crop monitoring.

Steele-Dunne earned her S.M. in 2002 and Ph.D. in 2006 in hydrology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her contributions include innovative approaches to soil moisture retrieval, radar backscatter analysis for vegetation parameters, and diurnal cycle exploitation for stress detection. She has been awarded an NWO Vidi grant for radar-based soil moisture studies and the prestigious NWO Vici grant in 2024, worth up to 1.5 million euros over five years, for the project 'Taking the pulse of Earth’s ecosystems.' Notable publications feature 'Radar Remote Sensing of Hydrologic Processes,' 'Microwave remote sensing for agricultural drought monitoring' (Frontiers in Water, 2022), 'The influence of vegetation water dynamics on the ASCAT backscatter' (HESS, 2022), 'Understanding Sentinel-1 backscatter response to sugarcane development' (Remote Sensing of Environment, 2023), and 'Assimilation of ASCAT normalized backscatter into the Community Land Model' (Remote Sensing of Environment, 2024). She serves on advisory boards for the European Space Agency, editorial board of Earth Observation, and teaches courses on microwave remote sensing and earth system science.