Meet Assistant Professor Khosro Ghobadi-Far
Khosro Ghobadi-Far is joining the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences and CU Boulder's Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences as an assistant professor.
Dr. Khosro Ghobadi-Far has a MS and PhD in geodesy. Before joining CU Boulder, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Virginia Tech, working on monitoring of water resources in California using various space geodetic techniques.
The basic component of his research is related to Earth gravity field and its temporal variations observed by the GRACE and GRACE Follow-On satellites. The aim of his basic research is to push the limit of GRACE/GRACE Follow-On to open new applications. He developed a novel GRACE data processing approach which led to the first-ever gravitational observation of tsunamis from space. He also works on quality assessment and improvement of gravity and mass change observations from these satellite missions.
His applied research deals with quantifying the impact of climate extremes and human water use on water resources. To that end, he integrates time-variable gravity observations from GRACE/GRACE-FO and surface deformation measurements from GNSS and InSAR with physics-based and hydrological models.
In his last work, he obtained a multiscale estimation of terrestrial water storage loss in California over the most recent drought using an integrated analysis of GRACE Follow-On time-variable gravity, GNSS measurements of drought-induced elastic uplift of Earth’s crust, and InSAR poroelastic deformation measurements of fast land subsidence over Central Valley caused by groundwater depletion.