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Dr. Sahra Kacimi

Photo of Sahra Kacimi

Address:

4800 Oak Grove Drive, Mail-Stop 300-323

Pasadena, CA 91109

Curriculum Vitae:

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Website:

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Member of:

Ocean Circulation And Air Sea Interaction

Scientist

Employed By

Caltech/JPL

Education

Ph.D., University of Versailles, France. (2009-2012)

M.S., University Paris 7 Denis Diderot, France. (2007-2008)

Professional Experience

  • Scientist at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (2021-present)
  • Engineer at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (2017-2020)
  • Visiting assistant researcher at Joint Institute For Regional Earth System Science and Engineering (UCLA); Jet Propulsion Laboratory (2015-2016)
  • NASA Postdoctoral program fellow at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (2012-2015)

Research Interests

  • Role of sea ice in global climate
  • Getting a better description of the sea ice thickness distribution using satellite and airborne measurements
  • Retrieval of snow depth on sea ice in the polar oceans
  • Drivers of snow depth and sea ice thickness variability in the Arctic and Southern Oceans
  • Sea ice-ocean interactions
  • Satellite and airborne altimetry

Selected Awards

  • 2023 NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal
  • 2022 JPL Charles Elachi Award
  • NASA postdoctoral fellowship at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena USA (2012-2015)
  • CNES/EADS-Astrium PhD fellowship at LATMOS, Paris France (2009-2012)

Selected Publications

  1. Magruder, L. A., Farrell, S. L., Neuenschwander, A., Duncanson, L., Csatho, B., Kacimi, S., & Fricker, H. A. (2024). Monitoring Earth’s climate variables with satellite laser altimetry. Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, 1-17.
  2. Kacimi, S., Vaze, P., Brown, S., Markus, T., Gardner, A., Colliander, A., & Nilsson, J. (2023, March). Using mm-wave observations to maximize the CRISTAL mission cryosphere science applications. In 2023 IEEE Aerospace Conference (pp. 1-8). IEEE.
  3. Kacimi, S. and Kwok, R. (2022). Arctic snow depth, ice thickness, and volume from ICESat-2 and CryoSat-2: 2018–2021. Geophysical Research Letters, 49, e2021GL097448. https://doi.org/10.1029/2021GL097448
  4. Kwok, R., Petty, A. A., Bagnardi, M., Kurtz, N. T., Cunningham, G. F., Ivanoff, A., and Kacimi, S. (2021), Refining the sea surface identification approach for determining freeboards in the ICESat-2 sea ice products. The Cryosphere, 15(2), 821-833.
  5. Kacimi, S., and Kwok, R. (2020), The Antarctic sea ice cover from ICESat-2 and CryoSat-2: freeboard, snow depth, and ice thickness, The Cryosphere, 14, 4453–4474, https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-14-4453-2020.
  6. Kwok, R., Cunningham, G. F., Kacimi, S., Webster, M. A., Kurtz, N. T., and Petty, A. A. (2020), Decay of the snow cover over Arctic sea ice from ICESat-2 acquisitions during summer melt in 2019. Geophysical Research Letters, 47, e2020GL088209. https://doi.org/10.1029/2020GL088209
  7. Kwok, R., Kacimi, S., Webster, M. A., Kurtz, N. T. and Petty, A. A. (2020), Arctic snow depth and sea ice thickness from ICESat-2 and CryoSat-2 freeboards: A first examination. Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, 125(3), e2019JC01600.
  8. Kwok, R., Kacimi, S., Markus, T., Kurtz, N.T., Studinger, M., Sonntag, J.G., Manizade, S.S., Boisvert, L.N., and Harbeck, J.P. (2019), ICESat-2 surface height and sea-ice freeboard assessed with ATM lidar acquisitions from Operation IceBridge, Geophysical Research Letters 46.20: 11228-11236.
  9. Steward, J., Haddad, Z., Hristova-Veleva, S., Kacimi, S., and Seo, E. K. (2018), Variational Deconvolution of Conically Scanned Passive Microwave Observations With Error Quantification. IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 57(2), 1001-1014.
  10. Kwok, R. and Kacimi, S. (2018), Three years of sea ice freeboard, snow depth, and ice thickness of the Weddell Sea from Operation IceBridge and CryoSat-2. The Cryosphere 12, 2789-2801.
  11. Kwok, R., Pang, S.S. and Kacimi, S. (2017), Sea ice drift in the Southern Ocean: Regional patterns, variability, and trends. Elem Sci Anth, 5.
  12. Haddad, Z.S., Sawaya, R.C., Kacimi, S., Sy, O.O., Turk, F.J. and Steward, J. (2017), Interpreting millimeter-wave radiances over tropical convective clouds, J. Geophys. Res. Atmos., 122, 1650–1664, doi:10.1002/2016JD025923.
  13. Kacimi, S., Viltard, N., and Kirstetter, P-E (2013), A new methodology for rain identification from passive microwave data in Tropics using neural networks. Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society: Special Issue on the Megha-Tropiques mission, 139, 912-922. doi: 10.1002/qj.2114