Amir AghaKouchak

Biographic Data

ID5824536
NAMEAmir AghaKouchak
GIVEN NAMESAmir
FAMILY NAMEAghaKouchak
SIGNATUREAGHAKOUCHAK A
AFFILIATIONSUniversity of California, Irvine
ORCID0000-0003-4689-8357
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS28
TOTAL CITATIONS21
WORKS AS AUTHOR28
WORKS AS EDITOR0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR2012
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2026
H-INDEX3

  • Iran’s policy priorities intensify water crisis

    Open AccessNima Shokri, Paolo D’odorico et al.ARTICLENature Sustainability2026References: 1

  • Heat-amplifying boreal forests exacerbate snowmelt, fuel availability and wildfires in sub-Arctic regions

    Open AccessJu Hyoung Lee, Marta Yebra et al.ARTICLEEnvironmental Research Letters2025

    Forests, once the largest terrestrial carbon sink, are increasingly becoming significant sources of carbon emissions worldwide due to large wildfires and the accumulation of fire fuels in warming environments that deplete soil and vegetation moisture. Despite growing needs such as Nature-Based Solutions, there is a lack of operationalized near-real-time satellite observations of forest fuel conditions to assess whether forests are acting as carbo…

  • Ignition matters

    Open AccessMojtaba Sadegh, John T Abatzoglou et al.ARTICLENature Sustainability2025

  • Balancing thermal power decarbonization and energy security under hydroclimatic risks

    Open AccessShiyu Li, Junguo Liu et al.ARTICLENature Sustainability2025References: 1

  • Global hydroclimatic risks and strategic decommissioning pathways for thermal power units

    Open AccessShiyu Li, Yong Liu et al.ARTICLENature Sustainability2025References: 7

  • Amplifying feedback loop between drought, soil desiccation cracking, and greenhouse gas emissions

    Open AccessFarshid Vahedifard, C Clay Goodman et al.ARTICLEEnvironmental Research Letters2024

    The continuous escalation of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions into the atmosphere is recognized as the primary catalyst for anthropogenic climate change. In 2021, CO2 emerged as the predominant contributor to the warming effect of all human-made greenhouse gases (GHGs), accounting for two-thirds of their global heating impact [1]. While the primary anthropogenic source of increased atmospheric CO2 concentration is the combustion of fossil fuels, th…

  • Human and infrastructure exposure to large wildfires in the United States

    Open AccessArash Modaresi Rad, John T Abatzoglou et al.ARTICLENature Sustainability2023Cited by: 2References: 1

  • Probabilistic modeling of crop-yield loss risk under drought

    Open AccessBahareh Kamali, Farshid Jahanbakhshi et al.ARTICLEEnvironmental Research Letters2022

    Assessing the risk of yield loss in African drought-affected regions is key to identify feasible solutions for stable crop production. Recent studies have demonstrated that Copula-based probabilistic methods are well suited for such assessment owing to reasonably inferring important properties in terms of exceedance probability and joint dependence of different characterization. However, insufficient attention has been given to quantifying the pr…

  • Streamflow droughts aggravated by human activities despite management

    Open AccessAnne F Van Loon, Sally Rangecroft et al.ARTICLEEnvironmental Research Letters2022

    Human activities both aggravate and alleviate streamflow drought. Here we show that aggravation is dominant in contrasting cases around the world analysed with a consistent methodology. Our 28 cases included different combinations of human-water interactions. We found that water abstraction aggravated all drought characteristics, with increases of 20%–305% in total time in drought found across the case studies, and increases in total deficit of u…

  • Large and inequitable flood risks in Los Angeles, California

    Open AccessBrett F Sanders, Jochen E Schubert et al.ARTICLENature Sustainability2022Cited by: 4References: 5

  • Increasing cloud water resource in a warming world

    Open AccessJingya Cheng, Qinglong You et al.ARTICLEEnvironmental Research Letters2021

    Under global warming, terrestrial water resources regulated by precipitation may become more unevenly distributed across space, and some regions are likely to be highly water-stressed. From the perspective of the hydrological cycle, we propose a method to quantify the water resources with potential precipitation capacity in the atmosphere, or hydrometeors that remain suspended in the atmosphere without contributing to precipitation, namely cloud …

  • The adaptive benefits of agricultural water markets in California

    Open AccessJesús Arellano-González, Amir AghaKouchak et al.ARTICLEEnvironmental Research Letters2021

    Climate change is expected to increase the scarcity and variability of fresh water supplies in some regions with important implications for irrigated agriculture. By allowing for increased flexibility in response to scarcity and by incentivizing the allocation of water to higher value use, markets can play an important role in limiting the economic losses associated with droughts. Using data on water demand, the seniority of water rights, county …

  • Intense agricultural irrigation induced contrasting precipitation changes in Saudi Arabia

    Open AccessMin‐Hui Lo, Hao‐Wei Wey et al.ARTICLEEnvironmental Research Letters2021

    Groundwater extraction has grown tremendously in Saudi Arabia to meet the irrigation water demand since the 1980s, and irrigation is one of the major anthropogenic factors modulating regional hydroclimate. However, the link between irrigation and hydroclimate is not well understood in a dry region such as Saudi Arabia. In this study, we utilize three different regional climate models to explore the physical mechanisms behind the irrigation impact…

  • A typology of compound weather and climate events

    Open AccessJakob Zscheischler, Olivia Martius et al.ARTICLENature Reviews Earth & Environment2020

  • Climate Extremes and Compound Hazards in a Warming World

    Amir AghaKouchak, Felicia Chiang et al.ARTICLEAnnual Review of Earth and…2020

    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 att…

  • Data and analysis toolbox for modeling the nexus of food, energy, and water

    Open AccessMojtaba Sadegh, Amir AghaKouchak et al.ARTICLESustainable Cities and Society2020

  • Changes in the exposure of California’s levee-protected critical infrastructure to flooding hazard in a warming climate

    Open AccessIman Mallakpour, Mojtaba Sadegh et al.ARTICLEEnvironmental Research Letters2020

    Levee systems are an important part of California’s water infrastructure, engineered to provide resilience against flooding and reduce flood losses. The growth in California is partly associated with costly infrastructure developments that led to population expansion in the levee protected areas. Therefore, potential changes in the flood hazard could have significant socioeconomic consequences over levee protected areas, especially in the face of…

  • Increasing concurrence of wildfire drivers tripled megafire critical danger days in Southern California between1982 and 2018

    Open AccessMohammad Sadegh Khorshidi, Philip E Dennison et al.ARTICLEEnvironmental Research Letters2020

    Wildfire danger is often ascribed to increased temperature, decreased humidity, drier fuels, or higher wind speed. However, the concurrence of drivers—defined as climate, meteorological and biophysical factors that enable fire growth—is rarely tested for commonly used fire danger indices or climate change studies. Treating causal factors as independent additive influences can lead to inaccurate inferences about shifting hazards if the factors int…

  • Latitudinal heterogeneity and hotspots of uncertainty in projected extreme precipitation

    Open AccessHossein Tabari, Parisa Hosseinzadehtalaei et al.ARTICLEEnvironmental Research Letters2019

    Projected precipitation from climate models is used in a wide range of fields for climate change impact assessment. However, the spatial pattern of uncertainty across latitudes and the global uncertainty hotspots are not well understood despite their importance for regional adaptation planning. In this study, we describe uncertainties in projected extreme precipitation changes per K global warming across latitudes, and decompose the overall uncer…

  • Increasing exposure of energy infrastructure to compound hazards

    Open AccessHamed Moftakhari, Amir AghaKouchakARTICLEEnvironmental Research Letters2019

    Floods and debris flows pose a significant threat, especially when extreme rain falls over burned areas. This is an example of a compound event in which two concurrent or consecutive events lead to extreme societal impacts. Compound and cascading hazards are becoming increasingly important and have notable impacts on threatened communities across the world. Wildfire followed by an intense precipitation event can result in a large flood under whic…

  • Domino effect of climate change over two millennia in ancient China’s Hexi Corridor

    Open AccessQi Feng, Linshan Yang et al.ARTICLENature Sustainability2019References: 7

  • Flexibility and intensity of global water use

    Open AccessYue Qin, Nathaniel D Mueller et al.ARTICLENature Sustainability2019Cited by: 6References: 7

  • Climate-informed environmental inflows to revive a drying lake facing meteorological and anthropogenic droughts

    Open AccessAneseh Alborzi, Ali Mirchi et al.ARTICLEEnvironmental Research Letters2018

    The rapid shrinkage of Lake Urmia, one of the world's largest saline lakes located in northwestern Iran, is a tragic wake-up call to revisit the principles of water resources management based on the socio-economic and environmental dimensions of sustainable development. The overarching goal of this paper is to set a framework for deriving dynamic, climate-informed environmental inflows for drying lakes considering both meteorological/climatic and…

  • Water shortages worsened by reservoir effects

    Open AccessGiuliano Di Baldassarre, Niko Wanders et al.ARTICLENature Sustainability2018Cited by: 3References: 10

  • California drought increases CO2 footprint of energy

    Open AccessE Hardin, Elizabeth C Hardin et al.ARTICLESustainable Cities and Society2017