About

Benjamin Zaitchik is the Morton K. Blaustein Chair and Professor at the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. His research is directed at understanding, managing, and coping with climatic and hydrologic variability. Understanding variability requires examination of the natural processes that drive climate and surface change. Managing variability relates to our ability to control anthropogenic influences on climate and hydrology at the local, regional, and global scales. Coping with variability includes improved forecast systems and methods of risk assessment. In each of these areas of research, he employs a combination of observation—both in situ and remotely sensed—and numerical modeling techniques.

Research topics

• Geography
• Environmental science
• Meteorology
• Geology
• Climatology
• Physical geography
• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Computer Security
• Medicine
• Psychology
• Ecology
• Engineering
• Demography
• Atmospheric sciences
• Environmental planning
• Civil engineering
• Medical emergency
• Aerospace engineering
• Archaeology
• Mathematics
• Environmental health
• Oceanography
• Gerontology

Selected publications

• Flooding and emergency department visits: Effect modification by the CDC/ATSDR Social Vulnerability Index

  International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction · 2022 · 36 citations

  • Computer Security
  • Sociology
  • Environmental health
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Toward park design optimization to mitigate the urban heat Island: Assessment of the cooling effect in five U.S. cities

  Sustainable Cities and Society · 2022 · 123 citations

  • Geography
  • Environmental science
  • Environmental planning
  DOI

• Emergency department visits associated with satellite observed flooding during and following Hurricane Harvey

  Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology · 2021 · 28 citations

  • Meteorology
  • Environmental science
  • Medical emergency
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Flash drought onset over the contiguous United States: sensitivity of inventories and trends to quantitative definitions

  Hydrology and earth system sciences · 2021 · 128 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Environmental science
  • Climatology

  Abstract. The term “flash drought” is frequently invoked to describe droughts that develop rapidly over a relatively short timescale. Despite extensive and growing research on flash drought processes, predictability, and trends, there is still no standard quantitative definition that encompasses all flash drought characteristics and pathways. Instead, diverse definitions have been proposed, supporting wide-ranging studies of flash drought but creating the potential for confusion as to what the term means and how to characterize it. Use of different definitions might also lead to different conclusions regarding flash drought frequency, predictability, and trends under climate change. In this study, we compared five previously published definitions, a newly proposed definition, and an operational satellite-based drought monitoring product to clarify conceptual differences and to investigate the sensitivity of flash drought inventories and trends to the choice of definition. Our analyses indicate that the newly introduced Soil Moisture Volatility Index definition effectively captures flash drought onset in both humid and semi-arid regions. Analyses also showed that estimates of flash drought frequency, spatial distribution, and seasonality vary across the contiguous United States depending upon which definition is used. Definitions differ in their representation of some of the largest and most widely studied flash droughts of recent years. Trend analysis indicates that definitions that include air temperature show significant increases in flash droughts over the past 40 years, but few trends are evident for definitions based on other surface conditions or fluxes. These results indicate that “flash drought” is a composite term that includes several types of events and that clarity in definition is critical when monitoring, forecasting, or projecting the drought phenomenon.

  DOI

• ENSO Teleconnection to Eastern African Summer Rainfall in Global Climate Models: Role of the Tropical Easterly Jet

  Journal of Climate · 2020 · 33 citations

  • Climatology
  • Environmental science
  • Atmospheric sciences

  Abstract Global climate models (GCMs) are critical tools for understanding and projecting climate variability and change, yet the performance of these models is notoriously weak over much of tropical Africa. To improve this situation, process-based studies of African climate dynamics and their representation in GCMs are required. Here, we focus on summer rainfall of eastern Africa (SREA), which is crucial to the Ethiopian Highlands and feeds the flow of the Blue Nile River. The SREA region is highly vulnerable to droughts, with El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) being a leading cause of interannual rainfall variability. Adequate understanding and accurate representation of climate features that influence regional variability is an important but often neglected issue when evaluating models. We perform a process-based evaluation of GCMs, focusing on the upper-troposphere tropical easterly jet (TEJ), which has been hypothesized to link ENSO to SREA. We find that most models have an ENSO–TEJ coupling similar to observed, but the models diverge in their representation of TEJ–SREA coupling. Differences in the latter explain the majority (80%) of variability in ENSO teleconnection simulation across the models. This is higher than the variance explained by rainfall coupling with the Somali jet (44%) and African easterly jet (55%). However, our diagnostics of the leading hypothesized mechanism in the models—variability in divergence in the TEJ exit region—are not consistent across models and suggest that a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of TEJ–precipitation coupling should be a priority for studies of climate variability and change in the region.

  DOI

• Night and day: The influence and relative importance of urban characteristics on remotely sensed land surface temperature

  Remote Sensing of Environment · 2020 · 218 citations

  • Environmental science
  • Remote sensing
  • Meteorology
  DOI

• Water, Geography, and Aksumite Civilization: The Southern Red Sea Archaeological Histories (SRSAH) Project Survey (2009–2016)

  African Archaeological Review · 2020 · 18 citations

  • Archaeology
  • Geography
  • Ecology
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: NILE-NEXUS: Opportunities for a sustainable food-energy-water future in the Blue Nile Mountains of Ethiopia

  NSF · $280k · 2016–2021

• PREEVENTS Track 2: Collaborative Research: Flash droughts: process, prediction, and the central role of vegetation in their evolution

  NSF · $620k · 2019–2024

• INFEWS/T1: Understanding multi-scale resilience options for vulnerable regions

  NSF · $3.0M · 2016–2022

• CNH: Agroecosystem-Based Climate Resilience Strategies in the Blue Nile Headwaters of Ethiopia

  NSF · $1.8M · 2012–2017

Frequent coauthors

• Hamada S. Badr

  Johns Hopkins University

  56 shared

• Matthew Rodell

  47 shared

• Martha C. Anderson

  39 shared

• Sujay V. Kumar

  38 shared

• Kristi R. Arsenault

  36 shared

• Margaret Kosek

  University of Virginia

  33 shared

• Wanshu Nie

  Goddard Space Flight Center

  32 shared

• Julia M. Gohlke

  28 shared

Education

• PhD, Geology & Geophysics

  Yale University

  2006

• MS, Crop & Soil Sciences

  Cornell University

  2001

• AB

  Harvard University

  1998

Similar researchers at Johns Hopkins University

• Richard Huganirh-210
• Steven L. Salzbergh-191
• Arturo Casadevallh-152
• Peter Campochiaroh-139
• Alan Yuilleh-134