The Engineering College has written a brief overview of my research interests for the general public. At Cornell, I am part of the Geophysics, Active Tectonics and Structure group, the Institute for the Study of Continents (INSTOC), and one of the many users of remote sensing data here.
My research has several thrusts:
(1) Soil moisture — I serve as the soil moisture lead for the NISAR mission that is described in these articles from Cornell and NASA
(2) Active tectonics -- he role of faults and folds in creating the landscape and creating natural hazards. To date, my work has focused in Iran (Lohman and Simons, 2005; Lohman and Barnhart, 2010; Barnhart and Lohman, 2012), the western U.S. (e.g., Lohman and Simons, 2002; Finnegan et al., 2008), New Zealand (Barnhart et al., 2011), and South America (Holtkamp et al., 2011; Devlin et al., 2012; Scott et al., 2013).
(3) The processes that control earthquake nucleation and growth. For example, we showed that a swarm of earthquakes in southern California was related to slow earthquakes (Lohman and McGuire, 2007).
(4) Development of tools to take full advantage of satellite-based geodetic imagery and parallel computing methods (e.g., Lohman and Simons, 2005). My group is developing new ways to process and invert large data volumes using InSAR persistent scatterers and finite element models. I was one of the developers of the open-source InSAR processing package called ROI_PAC, and continue to write new programs and update older ones. You can learn more about the program at our Cornell ROI_PAC site and the official Wiki page.
(5) Subsidence in the New Orleans/Mississippi River Delta. This project is with collaborators from JPL and LSU.
(6) Measuring tree height and biomass volume with InSAR