📢 Ph.D. Defense Announcement
📝 Title:
Compound Flood Assessment Leveraging Remote Sensing Data and Hydrodynamic Simulation in Low-Gradient Coastal Areas
👨🎓 Candidate:
Ebrahim Hamidi
🎓 Committee Chair:
Dr. Hamed Moftakhari
📅 Date & Time:
February 28, 11:30 AM (Central Time)
📍 Location:
Room 1012, North Lawn Hall
221 Hackberry Ln, Tuscaloosa, AL 35401
📝 Abstract:
Climate change has significantly impacted the environment, leading to an increase in extreme natural events. Flooding, caused by extreme precipitation, river runoff, and storm surges, has become one of the most frequent and destructive natural hazards. Coastal areas, with their dense populations and economic importance, are particularly vulnerable to compound coastal flooding driven by the combined effects of various flood drivers. During my Ph.D. research, I started studying compound coastal flooding by leveraging geospatial data analysis and remote sensing. Throughout that, I introduced a multi-source remote sensing approach with SAR (Sentinel-1) and optical satellite (Sentinel-2 and Landsat-8) data for global flood mapping in the Google Earth Engine platform. This study laid the groundwork for generating a Multi-Source Geo-Communication Tool for Global Flood Monitoring. Furthermore, hydrodynamic modeling is a key component of my research, which is complementary for flood delineation. By employing numerical models, I have investigated the importance of accurate digital elevation models (DEMs), domain-specific mesh generation, and suitable boundary conditioning to enhance flood simulations. Our findings demonstrate that combining modified DEMs with hybrid mesh can significantly improve the accuracy and efficiency of coastal compound flood simulations near urban settings. Furthermore, this research study investigates the integration of remote sensing data with numerical simulations to develop reliable flood protection measures, underscoring the essential role of continuous remote sensing observations in evaluating and calibrating numerical models. The outcome of this study demonstrates that our proposed integrated approach overcomes the limitations of both remote sensing and numerical modeling, leveraging their combined strengths for more accurate flood inundation assessments.
Keywords: Compound Coastal Flooding, Remote Sensing Data, Geospatial Analysis, Numerical Simulations, Appropriate DEM and mesh, Urban flood mitigation, Integration of Remotely Sensed Data and Numerical Simulation