Hydrologic
Systems Analysis Group
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[‘water cut’ by mary bourne.
commissioned by eccp for the eden benchmarks collection]
News
Congratulations
to Keith Sawicz and Christa Kelleher for passing their
Masters theses defenses on the topics of catchment classification and
temperature elasticity regionalization respectively in 2009. Both will continue
for their PhDs at Penn State.
The
Best Paper Award 2008 of the Journal Environmental Modeling and Software in the
Category Integrated Modelling was awarded to Yuqiong Liu, Hoshin Gupta, Everett
Springer and Thorsten Wagener for their paper Linking science with environmental decision making: Experiences from
an integrated modeling approach to support sustainable water resources
management [PDF].
In this paper the challenges involved in bridging science and decision making
in water resources management are discussed with reference to lessons drawn
from a long term integrated modeling project in the semi-arid southwestern USA.
The authors present a generic framework and guidelines for effective decision
support using integrated modeling and scenario analysis. The proposed approach
aims to produce ‘usable’ scientific information, by improving its credibility,
legitimacy and saliency for decision support.
Katie van Werkhoven has been
selected as the first place recipient of the US Universities Council for Water Resources (UCOWR) 2009 Ph.D.
Dissertation Award in the field of Natural Science and Engineering. Katie
graduated from Penn State with a Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering
in August 2008 with a dissertation titled Evaluating model behavior for
hydrologic forecasting in gauged and ungauged watersheds. Katie
lives and works in Phoenix with her husband and her recently born son.
New
Papers Published
Van Werkhoven, K.,
Wagener, T., Reed, P. and Tang, Y. 2009. Sensitivity-guided reduction of
parametric dimensionality for multi-objective calibration of watershed models.
Advances in Water Resources, 32(8), 1154-1169. [PDF]
Bai,
Y., Wagener, T. and Reed, P. 2009. A top-down framework for watershed model
evaluation and selection under uncertainty. Environmental Modeling and
Software, doi:10.1016/j.envsoft.2008.12.012. [PDF]
Wagener, T., Reed,
P., Van Werkhoven, K., Tang, Y. and Zhang, Z. 2009. Advances in the
identification and evaluation of complex environmental system models. Journal
of Hydroinformatics, 11(3-4), 266-281. doi:10.2166/hydro.2009.040 [PDF]
Wagener,
T., van Werkhoven, K., Reed, P. and Tang, Y. 2009. Multi-objective sensitivity
analysis of the information content in streamflow observations for distributed
watershed modeling. Water Resources Research, 45, doi:10.1029/2008WR007347. [PDF]
Our Research
Hydrology
deals with the movement and storage of water in complex environmental systems
in which humans are important actors. A systems approach is needed to properly
advance the science of hydrology and to achieve water security for people and
for nature. Our group uses systems methods to advance hydrologic theory and to
build and evaluate predictive models for sustainable water management.
Particular current interests are predictions in ungauged basins, uncertainty in
hydrologic modeling, catchment classification, and scenario analysis.
A
basic assumption in all our efforts is that education and research are
inherently related and cannot be treated separately. Current educational
interests include the development of case studies for water resource
engineering and the use of new technology like tablet PCs and student response
systems in the classroom.
We
are always looking for highly motivated graduate students and postdocs to join
our group. If any of the above topics (both research and education) interest
you, then please contact us.
Thorsten Wagener (thorsten
at engr.psu.edu), Pennsylvania State University, Department of Civil and
Environmental Engineering, 226b Sackett Building, University Park, PA16802,
tel. +1.814.865.5673, fax. +1.814.863.7304.
