Salem Ibrahim Salem

Junior Associate Professor, Ph.D. in Civil Engineering
Don't delay joy waiting for success; it's found in every step towards your goal. Welcome each failure as a lesson; they are the milestones on your journey. If you're ready, let's improve Earth observation and prediction together via remote sensing and machine learning.
E-Mail
salem.ibrahim
Areas of Research
Remote Sensing, Drone Measurement, Environment Monitoring, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Voice Recognition, Hydrometeorology, Climate Change Impact Assessment
  • Profile
  • Research
  • Dr. Salem Ibrahim Salem obtained his Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University of Tokyo, Japan in 2017. He obtained his B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Civil Engineering from Alexandria University, Egypt in 2005 and 2011, respectively. Dr. Salem worked as a full-time teaching assistant at the School of Engineering, Alexandria University for eight years. He was also a researcher at the University of Tokyo for two years. He is an ad-hoc reviewer for several international journals.

    Dr. Salem’s research has mainly focused on remote sensing for water resources and environmental monitoring. His research group’s key focus is to improve global monitoring of water quality, particularly for coastal and inland waters, using satellite missions such as GCOM-C, Sentinel-3, and MODIS. The ultimate goal is to provide timely, accurate satellite observation of water bodies to decision-makers in order to conserve human health and the aquatic environment by predicting and/or mitigating the occurrence of harmful conditions.

    Dr. Salem is currently a co-investigator of the validation team of the GCOM-C satellite through a JAXA research project. He is a member of the NASA/PACE Early Adopter program to develop water quality algorithms for the PACE satellite and promote PACE products among the Japanese community. Meanwhile, he is conducting many field campaigns at various Japanese lakes and coastal areas (e.g., Lake Kasumigaura, Tokyo Bay, Ise Bay and Setonaikai Bay). During field campaigns, many water quality measurements are conducted including apparent optical properties (i.e., remote sensing reflectance), inherent optical properties (e.g., absorption coefficients) and water quality parameters (e.g., chlorophyll concentrations).

    Additionally, Dr. Salem has been engaged in numerous research topics including voice recognition, data simulation, dynamic downscaling using atmosphere-ocean coupled regional spectral model (RSM-ROMS), and water and wastewater treatment. At his new position at KUAS, he is trying to incorporate the recent advances in machine learning into his research activities.

    In his free time, Dr. Salem enjoys spending time with family and friends, along with reading, playing table tennis and watching movies.

  • Water Measurement for the 21st Century

    Water is essential to all lifeforms, and monitoring of water resources is very critical to ensure their sustainability. Dr. Salem has been working on improving the accuracy of monitoring for the better part of his academic career.

    There are a variety of approaches in this field. The main methods are using satellite data and conducting field measurement. Field measurement produces very accurate data but is very time consuming and does not provide the condition for a whole body of water. Satellite data allows long-term daily recording, but satellites only measure reflective sunlight and not water quality data such as the concentration of water. A combination of these approaches is how Dr. Salem usually obtains his data, but recently advancements in drones have resulted in new potential. As in other fields of measurement, drones have the potential to change how we measure water dramatically. Drones fly much closer to the water than satellites, but they do not necessarily need the manpower and resources required for field measurement. With drones, high resolution images can be obtained for large bodies of water at higher efficiency than ever before, — especially if improvements in flying time (i.e. battery life) and camera functionality to include hyperspectral cameras come to fruition.

    How does Dr. Salem’s research contribute to our understanding of water? The first application that comes to mind is weather, water analysis helps make weather reports more accurate and expands its reach to a global scale. This goes beyond tomorrow’s forecast to include predictions for extreme weather such as floods, which is crucially important as such events have become more common in our changing climate. Further applications can benefit people whose livelihoods directly depends on bodies of water, such as fisherman. In developing nations, there is even higher demand, as the need for clean water (and thus the analysis of toxicity in water) is crucial. Dr. Salem has gathered data in Vietnam, Thailand, the East China Sea and Tokyo Bay, and is looking to continue his research to help understand the most crucial element to human life.