Dara Entekhabi

About

Dara Entekhabi is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. He holds the Bacardi and Stockholm Water Foundations Professorship. His research focuses on water security, climate, and environmental systems, contributing to the understanding and management of water resources and environmental challenges. As a faculty member, he is involved in advancing knowledge in these areas through research and education, supporting MIT's mission to address global water and environmental issues.

Research topics

• Environmental science
• Geology
• Atmospheric sciences
• Meteorology
• Computer Science
• Geography
• Remote sensing
• Climatology
• Ecology
• Soil science

Selected publications

• Detecting forest response to droughts with global observations of vegetation water content

  Global Change Biology · 2021 · 206 citations

  Droughts in a warming climate have become more common and more extreme, making understanding forest responses to water stress increasingly pressing. Analysis of water stress in trees has long focused on water potential in xylem and leaves, which influences stomatal closure and water flow through the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum. At the same time, changes of vegetation water content (VWC) are linked to a range of tree responses, including fluxes of water and carbon, mortality, flammability, an…

  DOI

• Global-scale assessment and inter-comparison of recently developed/reprocessed microwave satellite vegetation optical depth products

  Remote Sensing of Environment · 2020 · 180 citations

  DOI

• Validation of Soil Moisture Data Products From the NASA SMAP Mission

  IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing · 2021 · 172 citations

  The National Aeronautics and Space Administration Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission has been validating its soil moisture (SM) products since the start of data production on March 31, 2015. Prior to launch, the mission defined a set of criteria for core validation sites (CVS) that enable the testing of the key mission SM accuracy requirement (unbiased root-mean-square error <0.04 m³/m³). The validation approach also includes other (“sparse network…

  DOI

• Improved SMAP Dual-Channel Algorithm for the Retrieval of Soil Moisture

  IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing · 2020 · 145 citations

  The soil moisture active passive (SMAP) mission was designed to acquire L-band radiometer measurements for the estimation of soil moisture (SM) with an average ubRMSD of not more than 0.04 m <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">3</sup> /m <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">3</sup> volumetric accuracy in the top 5 cm for vegetation with a water content of less than 5 kg/m <sup xml…

  DOI

• Land‐Atmosphere Drivers of Landscape‐Scale Plant Water Content Loss

  Geophysical Research Letters · 2020 · 59 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Abstract Plant water content observations using microwave remote sensing measurements allow monitoring of landscape‐scale plant water stress. During soil drying following rainfall events, we use a Granger causality framework to quantify the degree to which environmental factors drive satellite‐based plant water content loss across Africa's diverse biomes. After soil drying into the water‐limited regime, satellite observations show that plants dry while solar radiation, vapor pressure deficit, an…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: The combined influence of sea ice and snow cover on Northern Hemisphere atmospheric climate variability

  NSF · $284k · 2015–2019

Frequent coauthors

• Narendra N. Das

  Michigan State University

  130 shared

• Thomas Jagdhuber

  University of Augsburg

  104 shared

• Kaighin A. McColl

  Harvard University

  102 shared

• Simon Yueh

  Jet Propulsion Laboratory

  99 shared

• Peggy O’Neill

  Goddard Space Flight Center

  89 shared

• María Piles

  Universitat de València

  88 shared

• Andrew F. Feldman

  Goddard Space Flight Center

  86 shared

• Alexandra G. Konings

  Stanford University

  86 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Hydrology

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  1984

• M.S., Hydrology

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  1981

• B.S., Civil Engineering

  University of Tehran

  1978

Awards & honors

• American Geophysical Union (AGU), Fellow
• American Meteorological Society (AMS), Fellow
• Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Fe…
• National Academy of Engineering (NAE), Member
• National Science Foundation (NSF), Presidential Young Invest…

Similar researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Eric J. Almh-125
• Markus J. Buehlerh-121
• Jesse Krollh-90