Researcher

Keywords

Fields of Research (FoR)

Machine learning not elsewhere classified, Applied statistics, Earth system sciences, Climate change science, Deep learning

SEO tags

Biography

Sanaa Hobeichi is a Senior Research Associate at the Climate Change Research Centre and the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Weather of the 21st Century. Her research applies artificial intelligence and machine learning across weather, climate and environmental science. Her work spans regional climate modelling, hydrological extremes and water-cycle change, climate-risk assessment, renewable energy, and emerging AI methods and foundation...view more

Sanaa Hobeichi is a Senior Research Associate at the Climate Change Research Centre and the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Weather of the 21st Century. Her research applies artificial intelligence and machine learning across weather, climate and environmental science. Her work spans regional climate modelling, hydrological extremes and water-cycle change, climate-risk assessment, renewable energy, and emerging AI methods and foundation models for Earth, climate and environmental applications.

Sanaa is the co-chair of the Machine Learning for Climate and Weather Community Working Group at the ACCESS-NRI.

Sanaa has a background in Climate Science, Biological and Environmental Science, Applied Mathematics, and Computer Science and she is a former International Baccalaureate teacher.


My Grants

  • 2026-2028 Office of National Intelligence Grant: Accelerating climate intelligence provision for risk assessment using machine learning and artificial intelligence. Chief Investigators: Andy Pitman, Anna Ukkola, Sanaa Hobeichi, Elisabeth Vogel, Scott Sisson, and Doug Richardson
  • 2026 Faculty of Science Research Grant: Is Equation Discovery an effective Machine Learning approach for Climate Science? A test case in drought modelling
  • 2026-2027 UNSW Science Translational Impact Seed Funding: Multisource Multiscale AI Fusion Framework for Observationally Constrained Solar Radiation Dataset

My Qualifications

PhD Climate Science | UNSW Sydney

MSc Biological and Environmental Sciences - Major Remote Sensing | Qatar University

BSc Applied Mathematics - Major Computer Science | Lebanese University


My Research Activities

Note: For publications with multiple authors, only the first author and my name are listed for brevity.

Earth foundation models for environmental hazard mapping

  • Zhuang, Y., Hobeichi, S. et al. (2026). Evaluating AlphaEarth Foundations Embeddings for Wildfire Susceptibility Mapping. (arXive Preprint)

Machine learning for regional climate modelling

This body of work applies machine learning to improve the spatial representation of climate variables, benchmark ML approaches against dynamical downscaling, and reduce the computational cost of regional climate simulations.

Selected publications:

  • Curran, D., Hobeichi, S. et al. (2026). Generate the Forest before the Trees- A Hierarchical Diffusion model for Climate Downscaling. Transactions on Machine Learning Research. (accepted)
  • Hobeichi, S. et al. (2026). Applying a standardised benchmarking framework to evaluate AI methods for precipitation downscaling over Australia. Artificial Intelligence for the Earth Systems.
  • Rampal, N., Hobeichi, S. et al. (2025). A Reliable Generative Adversarial Network Approach for Climate Downscaling and Weather Generation. Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems.
  • Rampal, N., Hobeichi, S. et al. (2024). Enhancing Regional Climate Downscaling through Advances in Machine Learning. Artificial Intelligence for the Earth Systems.
  • Nishant, N., Hobeichi, S. et al. (2023). Comparison of a novel machine learning approach with dynamical downscaling for Australian precipitation. Environmental Research Letters.
  • Hobeichi, S. et al. (2023). Using Machine Learning to Cut the Cost of Dynamical Downscaling. Earth's Future.

Machine learning in drought research

Machine learning is used here to improve drought characterisation, prediction, and interpretation.

Selected publications:

  • Hobeichi, S. et al. (2022). Toward a Robust, Impact-Based, Predictive Drought Metric. Water Resources Research.
  • Devanand, A., Hobeichi, S. et al. (2024). Australia's Tinderbox Drought: An extreme natural event likely worsened by human-caused climate change. Science Advances.
  • Grant, M. O., Hobeichi, S. et al. (2025). Historical trends of seasonal droughts in Australia. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences.
  • Holgate, C. M., Hobeichi, S. et al. (2025). Physical mechanisms of meteorological drought development, intensification and termination: an Australian review. Communications Earth & Environment.

Machine learning in renewable energy research

  • Richardson, D., Hobeichi, S. et al. (2026). Limited influence of climate modes of variability on residual load in Australia's electricity grid. Environmental Research: Energy.
  • Richardson, D., Hobeichi, S. et al. (2026). Wind power growth drives winter risk and supply-dominated variability in Australia's energy system. Environmental Research: Climate.
  • Richardson, D., Hobeichi, S. et al. (2025). Predicting Australian energy demand variability using weather data and machine learning. Environmental Research Letters.

Machine learning in paleoclimate research

  • Falster, G., Hobeichi, S. et al. (2026). High resolution monthly precipitation isotope estimaes across Australia from machine learning. EGUsphere.

Large-scale climate variability and predictability of precipitation and hydroclimate extremes

  • Hobeichi, S. et al. (2026). Climate-Mode Precursors and the Predictability of Amazon Hot and Dry Extremes. Earth's Future. (accepted)
  • Hobeichi, S. et al. (2024). How well do climate modes explain precipitation variability? npj Climate and Atmospheric Science.

Historical changes in hydrological and energy budgets

This body of work investigates historical changes in the terrestrial hydrological cycle and land–atmosphere energy exchanges, using observational synthesis products, energy and water budget closure, and model evaluation frameworks.

Selected publications:

  • Hobeichi, S. et al. (2022). Reconciling historical changes in the hydrological cycle over land. npj Climate and Atmospheric Science.
  • Hobeichi, S. et al. (2021). Robust historical evapotranspiration trends across climate regimes. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences.
  • Hobeichi, S. et al. (2020). Evaluating precipitation datasets using surface water and energy budget closure. Journal of Hydrometeorology.
  • Hobeichi, S. et al. (2020). Conserving land-atmosphere synthesis suite (CLASS). Journal of Climate.
  • Hobeichi, S. et al. (2019). Linear Optimal Runoff Aggregate (LORA). Hydrology and Earth System Sciences.
  • Hobeichi, S. et al. (2018). Derived Optimal Linear Combination Evapotranspiration (DOLCE). Hydrology and Earth System Sciences.

Scientific datasets (DOLCE, LORA, and CLASS)

  • Hobeichi, S. et al. (2021). Derived Optimal Linear Combination Evapotranspiration - DOLCE v3.0. NCI National Research Data Collection.
  • Hobeichi, S. et al. (2019). Conserving Land-Atmosphere Synthesis Suite (CLASS) v1.1. NCI National Research Data Collection.
  • Hobeichi, S. et al. (2018). Linear Optimal Runoff Aggregate (LORA) v1.0. NCI National Research Data Collection.
  • Hobeichi, S. et al. (2017). Derived Optimal Linear Combination Evapotranspiration v1.0. NCI National Research Data Collection.

My Research Supervision


Supervision keywords


Areas of supervision

Artificial intelligence and machine learning for environmental, weather and climate science


Currently supervising

Husnain Asif - PhD candidate at Australian National University
Project: Advancing climate model downscaling for southeast Australia with latent diffusion models
Supervising with: Prof. Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, Prof. John Taylor

Yuan Zhuang - PhD candidate at UNSW Sydney | Business School of Risk and Actuarial Studies
Project: Climate Disaster Insurance
Supervising with: A/Prof. Fei Huang and Prof. Peng Shi

Yicong (Ethan) Wang - MPhil candidate at UNSW Sydney | School of Built Environment
Supervising with: Senior Lecturer Sara Shirowzhan

Yajat Goswami - MPhil candidate at UNSW Sydney | Climate Change Research Centre
Project: Can AI learn Hydrology? Evaluating Physics-based and AI runoff & streamflow simulations across Australia's river basins
Supervising with: Prof. Lisa Alexander

Marlize Nel - PhD candidate at UNSW Sydney | Climate Change Research Centre
Project: Regional Australian Floods and Droughts in a Post-Net-Zero World
Supervising with: Prof. Lisa Alexander and A/Prof. Andrew King

Iris Nonneman - PhD candidate at UNSW Sydney | Climate Change Research Centre
Project: Machine Learning for Catastrophe Modelling
Supervising with: Prof. Andy Pitman and A/Prof. Fei Huang


My Engagement

Sanaa’s engagement and collaboration spans national research infrastructure, government science agencies and industry. She works closely with ACCESS-NRI and the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) to build capability in applied AI for weather, climate and environmental science, including access to machine-learning tools, computing environments and emerging foundation models. She also collaborates with the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO through technical exchange, training and research activities in AI for weather and climate.

Her industry engagement includes partnerships with Suncorp, Aon Reinsurance and Diagno Energy on climate-risk modelling, catastrophe-model emulation and renewable-energy applications.

More broadly, she contributes to professional training, scientific workshops and public communication aimed at improving the use and understanding of AI in environmental research and decision-making.

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