Quazi Hassan

The University of Calgary · Department of Geomatics Engineering

Study region: Athabasca River Basin (ARB), Canada. Study focus: This study aimed to characterize the flow regime of the ARB, a basin with diverse hydroclimatic and geological characteristics. Forty-two different flow indicators from the Indicators of Hydrological Alteration (IHA) and Cold regions Hydrological Indicators of Change (CHIC) were emp...

The exchange of energy, water, and carbon between the land surface and the atmosphere is critically influenced by vegetation. However, vegetation cover has been changing due to climate variability and human activities, which can affect ecosystems, biodiversity, land management, and human well-being. This study aimed to examine the impact of climate...

Accurate prediction of fire spread is considered crucial for facilitating effective fire management, enabling proactive planning, and efficient allocation of resources. This study places its focus on wildfires in two regions of Alberta, Fort McMurray and Slave Lake, in Southwest Canada. For the simulation of wildfire spread, an adapted fire propaga...

Forest fires are significant ecological and environmental phenomena that can be influenced by various climatic factors. This study used fire point records from the Canadian National Fire Database (CNFDB) and interpolated climate data, which include the minimum and maximum air temperature, the average relative humidity, and the precipitation for eac...

River flow monitoring is a critical task for land management, agriculture, fishery, industry, and others. Herein, a robust least-squares triple cross-wavelet analysis is proposed to investigate possible relationships between river flow, temperature, and precipitation in the time-frequency domain. The Athabasca River Basin (ARB) in Canada is selecte...

Heatwaves pose a significant risk to human society. Vulnerability to heatwaves is difficult to assess since it depends on a variety of factors, particularly at the local scale. This study aimed at evaluating the heatwave vulnerability of the five major cities of Bangladesh: Chittagong, Dhaka, Khulna, Rajshahi, and Sylhet. A heatwave vulnerability i...

The 10th percentiles (10P) of the daily minimum (Tmin) and maximum (Tmax) during 1971–2000 were determined to estimate a threshold for cold days. This 10P (a standard of extreme climatic condition suggested by the World Meteorological Organization) threshold was applied with the daily Tmin and Tmax in the winter months (December, January, and Febru...

Identifying areas susceptible to flash flood hazards is essential to mitigating their negative impacts, particularly in arid regions. For example, in southeastern Sinai, the Egyptian government seeks to develop its coastal areas along the Gulf of Aqaba to maximize its national economy while preserving sustainable development standards. The current...

The pace of Land Use/Land Cover (LULC) change has accelerated due to population growth, industrialization, and economic development. To understand and analyze this transformation, it is essential to examine changes in LULC meticulously. LULC classification is a fundamental and complex task that plays a significant role in farming decision making an...

Having a complete hydrological time series is crucial for water-resources management and modeling. However, this can pose a challenge in data-scarce environments where data gaps are widespread. In such situations, recurring data gaps can lead to unfavorable outcomes such as loss of critical information, ineffective model calibration, inaccurate tim...

Stream and river monitoring have an influential role in agriculture, the fishing industry, land surveillance, the oil and gas industry, etc. Recognizing sudden changes in the behavior of streamflow could also provide tremendous insight for decision-making and administration purposes. The primary purpose of this study is to offer a new robust Regime...

This research examined the characteristics of cold days and spells in Bangladesh using long-term averages (1971–2000) of maximum (Tmax) and minimum temperatures (Tmin) and their standard deviations (SD). Cold days and spells were calculated and their rate of change during the winter months (December–February) of 2000–2021 was quantified. In this re...

We analyzed the distribution and number of forest fire occurrences, burned areas, and seasonality, and their trends of human- and lightning-caused small (<200 ha) and large (≥200 ha) fires from 1959 to 2021 in the forested 14 subregions of Alberta, based on the Canadian National Fire Database. We applied a non-parametric statistical test, i.e., Man...

Understanding the land surface temperature (LST) trends is crucial for policymakers and stakeholders to develop adaptation and mitigation strategies suitable for a sustainable environment coping in the face of climate change. This article presents a systematic review of the studies related to delineating spaceborne sensor based LST trends, includin...

Spatiotemporal changes in land surface temperature (LST) over South Asia were estimated using MODIS (moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer) data from 2000 to 2021. We calculated the monthly and annual LST trends and magnitudes by applying the Mann–Kendall test and Sen's slope estimator at both ecoregion and pixel level. More ecoregions expe...

Herein, the focus was on the identification of similarities in the weather parameters collected within 19 stations, consisting of 3 weather networks located in the Lower Athabasca River Basin operated under the Oil Sands Monitoring program. These stations were then categorised into seven distinct groups based on comparable topography and land cover...

Globally, many studies on machine learning (ML)-based flood susceptibility modeling have been carried out in recent years. While majority of those models produce reasonably accurate flood predictions, the outcomes are subject to uncertainty since flood susceptibility models (FSMs) may produce varying spatial predictions. However, there have not bee...

The normalization of LST relative to environmental parameters is of great importance in various environmental applications. The purpose of this study was to develop a new approach for LST normalization relative to environmental variables. These included topographic variables (i.e. solar irradiance and near-surface temperature lapse rate (NSTLR)) as...

Supplementary Information for the article entitled: "Long Term Trend Analysis of River Flow and Climate in Northern Canada" https://doi.org/10.3390/hydrology9110197

Changes in water resources within basins can significantly impact ecosystems, agriculture, and biodiversity, among others. Basins in northern Canada have a cold climate, and the recent changes in climate can have a profound impact on water resources in these basins. Therefore, it is crucial to study long term trends in water flow as well as their i...

Monitoring spatiotemporal changes in climate and vegetation coverage are crucial for various purposes, including water, hazard, and agricultural management. Climate has an impact on vegetation, however, studying their relationship is challenging. We implemented the Least-Squares Wavelet (LSWAVE) software for investigating trend, coherency, and time...

This file is the Supplementary Materials associated with article entitled: "Wavelet-based spatiotemporal analyses of climate and vegetation for the Athabasca river basin in Canada" DOI: 10.1016/j.jag.2022.103044

The aim of this study was to develop a database of historical cold-related mortality in Bangladesh using information obtained from online national newspapers and to analyze such data to understand the spatiotemporal distribution, demographic dynamics, and causes of deaths related to cold temperatures in winter. We prepared a comprehensive database...

A high-resolution (1 km × 1 km) monthly gridded rainfall data product during 1901–2018, named Bangladesh Gridded Rainfall (BDGR), was developed in this study. In-situ rainfall observations retrieved from a number of sources, including national organizations and undigitized data from the colonial era, were used. Leave-one-out cross-validation was us...

Surface water/ice dynamic monitoring is crucial for many purposes, such as water resource management, agriculture, climate change, drought, and flood forecasting. New advances in remote sensing satellite data have made it possible to monitor the surface water/ice dynamics both spatially and temporally. However, there are many challenges when using...

Water resources are vital to the survival of living organisms and contribute substantially to the development of various sectors. Climatic diversity, topographic conditions, and uneven distribution of surface water flows have made reservoirs one of the primary water supply resources in Iran. This study used Landsat 5, 7, and 8 data in Google Earth...

The rapid decline in urban green (UGS) and blue space (UBS) in developing countries has led to a widespread degradation of available ecosystem services (ES). However, impacts of UGS and UBS changes on ES tend to vary over space and time, and to date these impacts have not been studied in sufficient detail in emerging economies. By comparing UGS and...

Background: Heatwaves have received major attention globally due to their detrimental effects on human health and the environment. The frequency, duration, and severity of heatwaves have increased recently due to changes in climatic conditions, anthropogenic forcing, and rapid urbanization. Australia is highly vulnerable to this hazard. Although th...

CMIP6-D&A is an R-based open source software with a user-friendly graphical user interface that is being developed to download and process climate data such as daily precipitation, minimum and maximum near surface air temperature stored/available in the network common data format (netCDF). Here, we demonstrate the capabilities of CMIP6-D&A in downl...

Continuous urban expansion transforms the natural land cover into impervious surfaces across the world. It increases the city’s thermal intensity that impacts the local climate, thus, warming the urban environment. Surface urban heat island (SUHI) is an indicator of quantifying such local urban warming. In this study, we quantified SUHI for the two...

The risk of forest and pasture fires is one of the research topics of interest around the world. Applying precise strategies to prevent potential effects and minimize the occurrence of such incidents requires modeling. This research was conducted in the city of Sanandaj, which is located in the west of the province of Kurdistan and the west of Iran...

River flow forecasting models assist in the understanding, predicting, monitoring, and managing of issues related to surface-water resources, such as water quality deterioration and flooding, or developing adaptation strategies to cope with climate change and increasing water demand. This review presents an overview of the current research status a...

The Athabasca Oil Sands Area (AOSA) in Alberta, Canada, is considered to have a high density of weather stations. Therefore, our objective was to determine an optimal network for the wind data measurement that could sufficiently represent the wind variability in the area. We used available historical data records of the weather stations in the thre...

Our objective was to quantify the similarity in the meteorological measurements of 17 stations under three weather networks in the Alberta oil sands region. The networks were for climate monitoring under the water quantity program (WQP) and air program, including Meteorological Towers (MT) and Edge Sites (ES). The meteorological parameters were air...

Although coastal and inland areas of Bangladesh exhibit distinct physiographic and climatic characteristics, spatiotemporal variation of extreme climatic events is poorly understood in these two areas. This study was an attempt to understand the trends in extreme climatic events in coastal and inland areas over the period 1968–2018. The missing dat...

Our aim was to study post-fire perceptions of selected mitigation strategies for wildland fire- induced risks proposed in a previous scientific study for the communities situated within the forested areas. Consequently, we considered engaging relevant professionals in the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo (RMWB), Alberta who experienced the cos...

Here, the objective was to study the local warming trend and its driving factors in the natu- ral subregions of Alberta using a remote-sensing approach. We applied the Mann–Kendall test and Sen’s slope estimator on the day and nighttime MODIS LST time-series images to map and quantify the extent and magnitude of monthly and annual warming trends in...

With the advent of the digital computer, time series analysis has gained wide attention and is being applied to many fields of science. This paper reviews many traditional and recent techniques for time series analysis and change detection, including spectral and wavelet analyses with their advantages and weaknesses. First, Fourier and least-square...

Study region: Athabasca River Basin (ARB) in Alberta, Canada. Study focus: Understanding the historical streamflow variability within basins is crucial to reduce the effect of utmost events, such as drought and floods on agriculture, fishery, and other human activities. The Least-Squares Wavelet software (LSWAVE) is applied to estimate the trend a...

There is currently a lack of knowledge regarding the spatiotemporal variation of day and night surface urban heat island intensity (SUHII) in the major cities of Bangladesh. These cities have a large population base and generally lack the resources to deal with rapid urbanisation impacts, so any increase in urban temperature has the potential to af...

Surface water quality is continuously changing due to anthropogenic activities and natural causes. The drinking water treatment technology can be expensive and ineffective if implemented without identifying the patterns of parameter exceedances. The objectives of this paper were to: (i) develop a mean exceedance model; (ii) apply the model for iden...

Catchments located in cold weather regions are highly influenced by the natural seasonality that dictates all hydrological processes. This represents a challenge in the development of river flow forecasting models, which often require complex software that use multiple explanatory variables and a large amount of data to forecast such seasonality. T...

The Upper Indus Basin (UIB) is a major source of supplying water to different areas because of snow and glaciers melt and is also enduring the regional impacts of global climate change. The expected changes in temperature, precipitation and snowmelt could be reasons for further escalation of the problem. Therefore, estimation of hydrological proces...

The spatial composition and configuration of land use land cover (LULC) in the urban landscape impact the land surface temperature (LST). In this study, we assessed such impacts at the neighbourhood level of the City of Edmonton. In doing so, we employed Landsat-8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) and Thermal Infrared Sensors (TIRS) satellite images to...

Like many other African countries, incidence of drought is increasing in Nigeria. In this work, spatiotemporal changes in droughts under different representative concentration pathway (RCP) scenarios were assessed; considering their greatest impacts on life and livelihoods in Nigeria, especially when droughts coincide with the growing seasons. Thre...

Artificial intelligence (AI) techniques have been successfully adopted in predictive modeling to capture the nonlinearity of natural systems. The high seasonal variability of rivers in cold weather regions poses a challenge to river flow forecasting, which tends to be complex and data demanding. This study proposes a novel technique to forecast flo...

Near real time (NRT) remote sensing derived land surface temperature (Ts) data has an utmost importance in various applications of natural hazards and disasters. Space-based instrument MODIS (moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer) acquired NRT data products of Ts are made available for the users by LANCE (Land, Atmosphere Near real-time Cap...

Drought is considered to be one of the most devastating natural hazards, causing widespread environmental and social damage in many parts of the world. Using standardized precipitation index, this work has assessed changes in the severity– area–frequency (SAF) relationship curve of seasonal droughts in Bangladesh. Changes were estimated for mild, m...

Both anthropogenic activities and natural factors affect river water in quantity and quality, while anthropogenic activities have been often blamed to cause water quality temporal degradation. Besides, riverine water quality displays intra-annual/seasonal variations, which are often more prominent than inter-annual variations. The intra-annual vari...

Drought is considered to be one of the most devastating natural hazards, causing widespread environmental and social damage in many parts of the world. Using standardized precipitation index, this work has assessed changes in the severity–area–frequency (SAF) relationship curve of seasonal droughts in Bangladesh. Changes were estimated for mild, mo...

Precipitation is a critical variable for comprehending various climate-related research, such as water resources management, flash flood monitoring and forecasting, climatic analyses, and hydrogeological studies, etc. Here, our objective was to evaluate the rainfall estimates obtained from Global Precipitation Mission (GPM), and Global Satellite Ma...

The Athabasca River watershed plays a dominant role in both the economy and the environment in Alberta, Canada. Natural and anthropogenic factors rapidly changed the landscape of the watershed in recent decades. The dynamic of such changes in the landscape characteristics of the watershed calls for a comprehensive and up-to-date land-use and land-c...

Population growth and population inflow from other regions has caused urbanization which altered land use land cover (LULC) in the lower Himalayan regions of Pakistan. This LULC change increased the land surface temperature (LST) in the region. LULC and LST changes were assessed for the period of 1990-2017 using Landsat data and the support vector...

Forest fires are natural disasters that create a significant risk to the communities living in the vicinity of forested landscape. To minimize the risk of forest fires for the resilience of such urban communities and forested ecosystems, we proposed a new remote sensing-based medium-term (i.e., four-day) forest fire danger forecasting system (FFDFS...

Open educational resources (OER) have become increasingly popular in recent times. Here, the aim was to synthesise the lessons learned through the development of OER materials for a university-level course called “environmental modelling”. Consequently, the topics of discussion included: (i) how to choose an appropriate creative commons license; (i...

Upper Indus Basin (UIB) supplies more than 70% flow to the downstream agricultural areas during summer due to the melting of snow and glacial ice. The estimation of the stream flow under future climatic projections is a pre-requisite to manage water resources properly. This study focused on the simulation of snowmelt-runoff using Snowmelt-Runoff Mo...

Although a detailed analysis of land use and land cover (LULC) change is essential in providing a greater understanding of increased human-environment interactions across the coastal region of Bangladesh, substantial challenges still exist for accurately classifying coastal LULC. This is due to the existence of high-level landscape heterogeneity an...

In this study, our aim was to model forest fire occurrences caused by lightning using the variable of vegetation water content over six fire-dominant forested natural subregions in Northern Alberta, Canada. We used eight-day composites of surface reflectance data at 500-m spatial resolution, along with historical lightning-caused fire occurrences d...

Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) contribute to geomorphological and hydrological applications. DEMs can be derived using different remote sensing-based datasets, such as Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) (e.g., Advanced Land Observing Satellite (ALOS) Phased Array type L-band SAR (PALSAR) and Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) DE...

Land use and land cover (LULC) change analysis is a critical instrument for studying urban growth across the world. Our objectives were to produce historical LULC maps during the 1988–2016 period for spatial and temporal analysis, forecast future LULC until 2040 by using the Markov model, and identify the impact of LULC on urbanization. Two scenes...

Warming, i.e., increments of temperature, is evident at the global, regional, and local level. However, understanding the dynamics of local warming at high spatial resolution remains challenging. In fact, it is very common to see extremely variable land cover/land use within built-up environments that create micro-climatic conditions. To address th...

Forest fire is one of the major natural hazards/disasters in Canada and many ecosystems across the world. Here, our objective was to enhance the performance of an existing solely remote sensing-based forest fire danger forecasting system (FFDFS), and its implementation over the northern region of the Canadian province of Alberta. The modified FFDFS...

Wildland fires are some of the critical natural hazards that pose a significant threat to the communities located in the vicinity of forested/vegetated areas. In this paper, our overall objective was to study the structural damages due to the 2016 Horse River Fire (HRF) that happened in Fort McMurray (Alberta, Canada) by employing primarily very hi...

Surface waters are prone to the influences from both natural condition and anthropogenic activities. The aim of this paper was to study the impacts of one natural variable, precipitation, and its change posed by a changing climate on water quality of three rivers in Alberta, Canada. Eleven water quality parameters monitored during the time period o...

The northeastern region of Bangladesh often experiences flash flooding during the pre-harvesting period of the boro rice crop, which is the major cereal crop in the country. In this study, our objective was to delineate the impact of the 2017 flash flood (that initiated on 27 March 2017) on boro rice using multi-temporal Landsat-8 OLI and MODIS dat...

Flooding is one of the natural disasters that affect the livelihood of the people living in the floodplains, like Bangladesh. Here, we proposed to employ SAR satellite images in assessing the flood extent and crop damage with the hydrometeorological observations in the southwestern region of Bangladesh. We observed that the unusual flood of the yea...

Pan-sharpening is the process of fusing higher spatial resolution panchromatic (PAN) with lower spatial resolution multispectral (MS) imagery to create higher spatial resolution MS images. Here, our overall objective was to pan-sharpen Landsat-8 images and calculate vegetation greenness (i.e., normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI)), canopy...

The objective of the study was to develop a remote sensing (i.e., Landsat-8 and MODIS)-based agricultural drought indicator (ADI) at 30 m spatial resolution and 8-day temporal resolution and also to evaluate its performance over heterogeneous agriculture dominant semi-arid region in Jordan. Firstly, we used principal component analysis (PCA) to eva...

Understanding the warming trends at local level is critical; and, the development of relevant adaptation and mitigation policies at those levels are quite challenging. Here, our overall goal was to generate local warming trend map at 1 km spatial resolution by using: (i) Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS)-based 8-day composite su...

The lower Athabasca River watershed is one of the most important regions for Alberta and elsewhere due to fact that it counts for the third largest oil reserve in the world. In order to support the oil and gas extraction, Athabasca River provides most of the required water supply. Thus, it is critical to understand the characteristics of the river...

Agricultural drought is a natural hazard that can be characterized by shortage of water supply. In the scope of this paper, we synthesized the importance of agricultural drought and methods commonly employed to monitor agricultural drought conditions. These include: (i) in-situ based methods, (ii) optical remote sensing methods, (iii) thermal remot...

This study aimed to develop a remote sensing-based method for forecasting rice yield by considering vegetation greenness conditions during initial and peak greenness stages of the crop; and implemented for “boro” rice in Bangladeshi context. In this research, we used Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS)-derived two 16-day composite...

Endocrine-disrupting compounds may produce infertility, nervous system disorders, and improper functioning of the immune system in humans and wildlife. Estrogens are classified as the most potent and common endocrine-disrupting compounds and the major point source for estrogen is municipal wastewater. Monitoring of estrogen is challenging, expensiv...

Here, our objective was to develop a spatio-temporal image fusion model (STI-FM) for enhancing temporal resolution of Landsat-8 land surface temperature (LST) images by fusing LST images acquired by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS); and implement the developed algorithm over a heterogeneous semi-arid study area in Jor-dan,...