Rate My Professor Susanna Werth

Susanna Werth is an Assistant Professor of Hydrology and Remote Sensing in the Department of Geosciences at Virginia Tech, where she serves as director of the Hydrogeodesy and InSAR Remote Sensing (HIRS) Lab. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Potsdam, Germany, supported by a scholarship from the German Research Center for Geosciences, with research focused on integrating satellite gravimetry data into global hydrological modeling. Her postdoctoral work included positions at the University of Potsdam and GFZ Potsdam, involving hydrological and geophysical field campaigns in Spain and South Africa, followed by a postdoctoral role at Arizona State University centered on monitoring large-scale groundwater aquifers. From 2015, she developed her independent research and teaching program as a research professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration and the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University prior to her appointment at Virginia Tech.

Werth specializes in satellite gravimetry, large-scale hydrology, and water resource management. Her research examines the time-dependent Earth gravity field, terrestrial water cycle and resources management, interactions between water, climate, environment, and human societies, as well as signal processing techniques. She advances monitoring, modeling, and forecasting of Earth's water mass budget variations using remote sensing data including GRACE, InSAR, and GNSS, with applications to drought assessment, land subsidence, and groundwater dynamics. Key publications include "A novel hybrid GNSS, GRACE, and InSAR joint inversion approach to constrain water loss during a record-setting drought in California" (Carlson, Werth, & Shirzaei, Remote Sensing of Environment, 2024); "Groundwater Volume Loss in Mexico City Constrained by InSAR and GRACE Observations and Mechanical Models" (Khorrami et al., Geophysical Research Letters, 2023); "A shrinkage-free approach for fusing GRACE-based total water storage changes with models using wavelet multiresolution analysis" (Ghobadi-Far, Werth, & Shirzaei, Journal of Hydrology, 2023); and "A global analysis of temporal and spatial variations in continental water storage" (2007), cited over 247 times. Her lab has received a $1.3 million NASA grant to study freshwater demand and flooding in the Chesapeake Bay, and her findings on land subsidence risks in U.S. metropolises and river deltas have appeared in Nature journals and garnered coverage in The New York Times and The Washington Post. Werth has been an invited speaker at the Virginia Tech Office for GIS and Remote Sensing Research Symposium.