Dr Abdou Khouakhi

Cranfield University

Abdou obtained a PhD in coastal hazards and coastal vulnerability. His PhD integrated various remote sensing data and GIS modelling to assess coastal erosion and flood risk and worked with stakeholders to develop measurable coastal sustainability indicators. He then worked as a Postdoctoral research scholar at the IIHR-Hydroscience & Engineering, The University of Iowa, the USA where he worked on extremes in weather and climate impacts such as extreme sea level/rainfall, heat stress, tropical storms and their connection to climate harnessing data science approach and analytics. Before joining Cranfield in 2020, Abdou worked also as a research associate at Loughborough University, UK where he contributed to an EPSRC project on developing a real-time monitoring and early warning system for urban floods and water level monitoring, using a bespoke network of wireless water sensors combined with machine learning. Further information can be found here

Research interests

Abdou is a Lecturer in Remote sensing at the Cranfield Environment Centre, School of Water, Energy, and Environment. His research interests include extreme weather/climate and water extremes. More broadly, Abdou has a keen interest in the application of Geospatial Data Science, Earth Observation, and Machine Learning to better understand extreme weather and climate related-events and how their combination/connection contributes to societal and environmental risk.

Current Projects and Collaborations

Abdou contributed as Co-I and in the delivery of various projects including NERC: COP26 Potential for scaling up indigenous rainwater harvesting techniques in semi-arid regions of India. EPSRC-GCRF on Emergency flood planning and management using unmanned aerial systems. He recently secured funding from NERC to run advanced training on earth observation data science for early career environmental scientists and a NERC CENTA DTP Studentship- (2021-2024) on Weather Patterns and AI for Crop Yield Variability Prediction.