Civil Engineering professor Hosni Ghedira is partnering with the Emirates Institution for Advanced Science and Technology (EIAST) to establish a world-class environmental observation and monitoring program. Dr. Ghedira's current research activities with EIAST focus on developing new satellite-based tools to forecast detect and monitor different environmental hazards in the UAE and the Gulf region. Currently, four engineers and graduate students are working on 3 different research projects: sandstorms, fogs and coastal water pollution.

 

One of the ongoing research projects is the development of a satellite-based tool for forecasting, detection and classification of fog events in Dubai metropolitan area and in UAE main roads and highways. Two graduate students from Khalifa University of Science, Technology and Research (KUSTAR) are working on this project under the co-supervision of Dr. Ghedira. Fog maps are generated to represent reflectance values in order to classify each fog event into different density levels.

 

Raw data are currently collected by the European Satellite METEOSAT. The DubaiSat satellite system, the first spatial program in the Middle East dedicated to environmental observation and monitoring, will launch its first platform, DubaiSat-1, in early 2009. The new satellite data, combined with existing earth observation satellites, will provide potentially significant enhancements to the predictive capabilities of the existing environmental models as well as improved capabilities for monitoring and predicting natural hazards such as sandstorms, land degradation, desertification and droughts.