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Biography |
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Prof. El-Askary received his PhD in Computational Sciences and Informatics from George Mason University, in 2004; along with his two MS degrees in Computational Sciences and Earth Systems Sciences. He is also a Professor of Environmental Physics on leave with the Department of Environmental Sciences, Faculty of Science, Alexandria University, Egypt. Prof. El-Askary was also affiliated with the National Authority of Remote Sensing and Space Sciences (NARSS), Cairo. Dr. El-Askary has been also elected on a national basis to be a member of 30 in the Ministry of Justice consultant team for Environmental Affairs since 2008 to–date. He is the 2015 recipient of the Chapman University's elite Senior Wang-Fradkin Professorship award. He was named as one of six “Game Changers: Orange County Leaders Transforming the World” by the Orange County Business Council. Prof. El-Askary also served as the regional coordinator on a $3 million Euro grant from the European Union (EU) Horizon 2020 that started February 2016. The three–year project, known as GEO-CRADLE (Coordinating and integrating state-of-the-art Earth Observation Activities in the regions of North Africa, Middle east, and Balkans and Developing Links with GEO related initiatives toward GEOSS).
Currently, he is serving as the Vice-Leader to the WG3 Dissemination and capacity building work package in the InDUST cost imitative amongst leading scientists from Europe. His research interests include dust storms monitoring and detection using different remote sensing technologies, as well as studying other extreme events. He is also involved in studying air pollution problems over mega cities due to natural and man-made effects, as well as climate change and its impacts on sea level rise and coral reefs for coastal areas. In 2019,
Prof. El-Askary contributed, among only 200 scientists worldwide, to the (IPCC) report on the Desertification Chapter. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the official entity that issues the state of the climate report once every 5 years that must get approved, acknowledged and acted upon by all nations of the world. He was also invited by the UN Secretariat to the COP14 meeting in New Delhi to present on the sand and dust storms side event to be part of the global sand and dust storms coalition. Prof. El-Askary has published over a 100 refereed research publications, conferences, full paper and book chapters in these research areas. Dr. El-Askary’s research has been supported by National Science Foundation, NASA, United States Department of Agriculture and European Union. Dr. El-Askary has received the Saudi Arabia award hosted by the Arab Administrative Development Organization (ARADO) affiliated with the League of Arab States for the best published article in Environmental Management among 150 articles in 2006. He is also member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), AGU, EGU, COSPAR, and Phi Beta Delta Honor Society. Today, Prof. El-Askary views himself as an Earth System Scientist with a major interest in hazards, atmospheric events and climate. He is particularly interested in events that have a glocal impact (going from global to local) and mixing scenarios between natural and anthropogenic generated aerosols.
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Abstract |
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Earth Observations in service of the sustainable development goals by addressing the changing spheres and the future of global climate change |
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There is no point in denying climate change because as it is quite evident that we are not winning. Earth is a complex system of interacting physical, chemical and biological processes, and provides a natural laboratory whose experiments have been running since the beginning of time. We are living in a dynamic interactive system which is made up by a series of spheres: the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, the cryosphere, and the biosphere. Those spheres can be seen as standalone subsystems that is why we always refer to Earth as the system of the systems or subsystems. However, we cannot treat them in isolation from each other. This is because each of these spheres does have its own processes that might also be involved or affected by other processes in other spheres.
We have just been focusing on global warming, rising temperature and the increasing carbon dioxide (CO¬2) emissions. We have witnessed and measured that since the preindustrial age the earth global average temperature has increased by more than 1c as of now. Typically 2c has become a well-known figure for all involved in climate change science based on political decision mainly done by the Europeans. Latest science research pointed that this number is quite high and climate is too sensitive more than what we thought, yet it is foreseen now that 3c is more a realistic number by 2100 and we are currently on track. It has been noticed that the frequency, magnitude and duration of multiple weather extremes have captured the attention and interest of world citizens in recent years. We are experiencing extreme events that are stronger in magnitude and duration as compared with historical records. It appears that frequency of larger precipitation events is also increasing, but the smaller events diminishing resulting in same or even less net amount of precipitation for some regions that occur in fewer but more intense periods, i.e. distribution is different. However, our main issue is the randomness and although it is a factor in forecasting disasters, most natural events don’t occur as randomly as tosses of a coin. This talk we will highlight some recent hazards, atmospheric events, droughts, lack of water resources, stressed vegetation in relation to the changing climate through earth observations. Satellite observations and modeling techniques proved to be vital in studying the interactions and ongoing processes between the Earth’s various subsystems focusing on investigating the impact of natural and anthropogenic aerosols on: cloud micro-physics, hurricanes, human health and local climate. As such we used several remote sensing instruments with respect to monitoring dust storms over different regions namely, Nile Delta, Saudi Arabia, Himalayas, South Korea, Sierra Nevada and much more. Our synergistic use of recent advances in satellite technology and sophisticated modeling provides a state of the art approach in mapping dust sources, monitors airborne dust properties, and predicts dust outbreaks and their airborne pathways and concentrations in order to alert affected sectors of potential impacts.
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