Kibrewossen Tesfagiorgis

Assistant Professor Kibrewossen Tesfagiorgis received a B.S. in Civil Engineering from Mekelle University, Ethiopia, and taught there for two years. He earned an M.S. in Water Resources Engineering from KU Leuven University/Free University of Brussels, Belgium, then completed a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering at the Graduate Center, CUNY, focusing on remote sensing and hydrology.
Tesfagiorgis worked as a postdoctoral scientist at NOAA-CREST, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration-Cooperative Remote Sensing Science and Technology Center at City College, CUNY, where he joined a project developing a Global Flood Monitoring System, using microwave satellite data to estimate the soil wetness variational index (SWVI).
Since joining the faculty at BMCC in 2013, Tesfagiorgis mentors students through the National Science Foundation (NSF) and LSAMP (the Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation), with a focus on managing the world’s water resources and minimizing the loss of life caused by devasting flood events.
Through this most recent project, Tesfagiogis’s students are analyzing a 2013 flood in Uttarakhand, India that caused over 6,000 fatalities. To enhance the students’ research skills, Tesfagiorgis coordinates training for them in computer coding thorugh a MATLAB workshop with NOAA-CREST at City College/CUNY.
The programming language MATLAB, he explains, enables scientists to work with large amounts of data, and enables researchers to compare data sets with those from the Dartmouth Flood Observatory, SWVI and TRMM (NASA’s Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission) to determine how flooding and rainfall are correlated.
He has expanded his flooding project by incorporating additional satellite datasets,and is also investigating the dynamics of water storage over Lake Eyre, Australia using Polarization Ratio Variational Index (PRVI) values from The Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E).