Amir Aghakouchak

About

Amir Aghakouchak is a Chancellor’s Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Irvine, where he also serves as the director of the Center for Hydrometeorology and Remote Sensing (CHRS). His research focuses on natural hazards and climate extremes, bridging the disciplines of hydrology, climatology, and remote sensing. A central theme of his work is the study of interactions among climatic and nonclimatic hazards, particularly compound and cascading events. He has developed innovative tools for monitoring and modeling hydrologic extremes and has organized international meetings and training workshops in various regions for multiple agencies, including the U.S. State Department, NOAA, UNESCO, and others.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Environmental science
• Geography
• Ecology
• Political Science
• Environmental resource management
• Sociology
• Business
• Psychology
• Biology

Selected publications

• A typology of compound weather and climate events

  Nature Reviews Earth & Environment · 2020 · 1382 citations

  DOI

• Climate Extremes and Compound Hazards in a Warming World

  Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences · 2020 · 983 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Climate extremes threaten human health, economic stability, and the well-being of natural and built environments (e.g., 2003 European heat wave). As the world continues to warm, climate hazards are expected to increase in frequency and intensity. The impacts of extreme events will also be more severe due to the increased exposure (growing population and development) and vulnerability (aging infrastructure) of human settlements. Climate models attribute part of the projected increases in the inte…

  DOI

• Understanding and managing connected extreme events

  Nature Climate Change · 2020 · 652 citations

  DOI

• A century of observations reveals increasing likelihood of continental-scale compound dry-hot extremes

  Science Advances · 2020 · 352 citations

  Using over a century of ground-based observations over the contiguous United States, we show that the frequency of compound dry and hot extremes has increased substantially in the past decades, with an alarming increase in very rare dry-hot extremes. Our results indicate that the area affected by concurrent extremes has also increased significantly. Further, we explore homogeneity (i.e., connectedness) of dry-hot extremes across space. We show that dry-hot extremes have homogeneously enlarged ov…

  DOI

• Large and inequitable flood risks in Los Angeles, California

  Nature Sustainability · 2022 · 124 citations

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• I-Corps: Global Integrated Drought Monitoring and Prediction System

  NSF · $50k · 2013–2015

• Collaborative Research: Resilience of Geotechnical Infrastructure under a Changing Climate: Quantitative Assessment for Extreme Events

  NSF · $240k · 2016–2019

• A Nested Multi-Scale Hydrological Modeling Framework: Assessing Resilience and Vulnerability to Climate Change

  NSF · $225k · 2013–2017

Frequent coauthors

• Mojtaba Sadegh

  Boise State University

  137 shared

• Hamed Moftakhari

  125 shared

• Farshid Vahedifard

  Tufts University

  105 shared

• Laurie S. Huning

  University of California, Irvine

  97 shared

• Omid Mazdiyasni

  University of California, Irvine

  94 shared

• Iman Mallakpour

  Irvine University

  82 shared

• Brett F. Sanders

  Irvine University

  80 shared

• Soroosh Sorooshian

  University of California, Irvine

  75 shared

Awards & honors

• Plinius Medal, European Geosciences Union (EGU) (2026)
• Robert E. Horton Lecturer in Hydrology, American Meteorologi…
• Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher Award Recipient (2020, 202…
• ASCE Norman Medal (2022)
• ASCE Huber Prize (2020)

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