Global Flood, Remote Sensing, Hydrology.

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 devastating flood events.

He also trains students how to use MATLAB for research. 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).

Prof. Tesfagiorgis recent researches focus on fixed bed adsorption simulation, hydrological modeling and watershed analysis. To enhance the students’ design skills, Tesfagiorgis coordinated a summer internship program for BMCC’s engineering students. During the internship program, students learned the design process and cost estimation for an engineering project.