Alia Khan
Research Affiliate
About Alia
Dr. Alia Khan is an Associate Professor in the Aerospace Engineering Sciences Department at CU-Boulder. She has been working in polar and high mountain regions for over a decade to quantify the impacts of black carbon and other light absorbing particles on the surface albedo of the cryosphere. She combines optical remote sensing (by UAV and satellite) with ground-based biogeochemical analysis to document snow and ice melt in mountainous and polar regions. She completed her PhD in August 2016 in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Colorado – Boulder, while working at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, an interdisciplinary research institute focused on documenting environmental change in the polar regions. She then worked as a Postdoc at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, CO with a primary focus on water and snow chemistry in High Mountain Asia as part of a USAID funded project. Dr. Khan was an Assistant and Associate Professor at Western Washington University from 2019 - 2025 before returning to CU. She is always eager to hear from prospective PhD students, Postdocs, and collaborators.
Specialties
Current Research
Dr. Khan is managing over 3 million dollars in federal research funding from six projects (3 NASA-funded and 4 NSF-funded) across the global cryosphere, from the Arctic to the Antarctic, and the glaciated North Cascades. Her work spans both poles and most surfaces of the cryosphere (snow, glaciers, sea ice and ice sheets). She a new NASA PACE-Science award focused on the Arctic to investigate darkening of the bare ice region of the Greenland Ice sheet. She has a five-year NSF-CAREER award that utilizes the wealth of new high resolution multi-spectral satellite imagery to explore the role of coastal Antarctic snow algae and light absorbing particles on snowmelt. Both projects incorporate field campaigns to gather spectral irradiance ground-validation data, as well as snow and ice samples that are brought back to her wet lab for chemical analyses. Sources of support: NSF and NASA
The research that she and her students are conducting demonstrates that snow algae can contribute substantially to albedo change, resulting in snow melt advancement. This is of concern because warming temperatures will likely further stimulate snow algae blooms in high alpine and high latitude environments. Much of her current research focus is on developing novel algorithms for detection and mapping of snow algae blooms with uncrewed aerial systems (UASs) and space-based platforms.
Other current awards include an NSF-EAGER award that utilizes data from multi and hyperspectral imagers to map spectral properties of sea ice and advised a team engineering students in the Colorado Space Grant Consortium who are helping to develop a robotic system to retrieve snow samples with a UAV. Additionally, Dr. Khan is leading an NSF-RAPID award to quantify the impacts of increased smoke deposition on the Greenland Ice Sheet, due to an increase in high-latitude wildfires. Sources of support: NSF
Commercial Sensor Evaluation for Detection and Mapping of Snow Algae: Snow algae are common in alpine snowpacks in the global cryosphere. The team’s recent research shows that snow algae are drivers of snowmelt due to their absorption of solar radiation in the visible wavelengths, which leads to a significant reduction in snow albedo. However, snow algae are ephemeral and often occur in small patches. This research evaluates high resolution commercial satellite data (CSD) for detection and mapping of snow algae through comparison of in situ snow samples collected for laboratory analysis. Research uses the Pacific Northwest cryosphere to develop novel algorithms based on in situ snow sample collection. An additional objective is to evaluate CSD products for their utility in snow algae detection and mapping. After collecting snow samples from the field, the team analyzes them in the lab and uses the data to validate satellite-derived maps of colored snow algae from space. Source of support: NASA
Education
