Events Calendar

Astani CEE. Dept Seminar

Speaker: Mohammad Ebtehaj , University of Minnesota

Talk Title: Hydro-meteorological Inverse Problems via Sparse Regularization

Abstract: The past decades have witnessed a remarkable emergence of new sources of multi-scale multi-sensor geophysical data such as precipitation, evapotranspiration, soil moisture, and vegetation. These data provide a unique opportunity to better understand land surface hydro-meteorological processes and to improve our environmental forecast skills. For precipitation, these data typically include global spaceborne active and passive sensors and regional ground-based radars. Focusing on the non-Gaussian and heavy tailed statistical structure of precipitation data, new frameworks are presented that address optimal retrieval, fusion and resolution enhancement of multi-sensor rainfall data. These frameworks rely on recent advancements in computational methods for sparse solutions of inverse problems. Compared to the existing classic methodologies, the results of the proposed approaches promise improved posterior estimates of precipitation fluxes to be used for more accurate prediction of extreme land surface hydro-geomorphic events, such as floods and landslides. Future extension of the proposed approaches to data assimilation problems and other land surface applications are also discussed.

Biography: Mohammad Ebtehaj is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Civil Engineering and the Saint Anthony Falls Laboratory at the University of Minnesota. He will complete his degree in June 2013 with a double major -- PhD in civil engineering and M.Sc. in mathematics. He is currently a NASA Earth and Space Science Fellow (NESSF) and a University of Minnesota Doctoral Dissertation Fellow (DDF). He received his B.Sc. in civil engineering from Iran University of Science and Technology (IUST) in 1999, where he also received two M.Sc. degrees in environmental and earthquake engineering in 2001 and 2007, respectively. He has worked in industry for almost seven years as a design civil engineer in his country. His research interests are in computational geophysics, focusing on remote sensing hydro-meteorological inverse problems, specifically statistical and mathematical characterization of precipitation images from ground and space sensors. His work “Adaptive Fusion and Sparse Estimation of Multi-sensor Precipitation” received the 2011 outstanding student paper award of the American Geophysical Union.

Host: Astani CEE Dept.

Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 209

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Cassie Cremeans