Research

Reservoir Operation and Re-operation

Reservoirs serve as critical infrastructure providing flood control, water supply, hydroelectricity, navigation, ecologic and environmental services.

• A global analysis of synergies and tradeoffs between hydroelectricity generation (water for energy) and irrigation (water for food). (ERL, featured in ERL Highlights of 2017)
• How do reservoir managers make decisions for water release?  Multi-purpose reservoir operations operation targets are embedded at different time scale (e.g., hourly for hydroelectricity, daily for flood control, seasonal for water supply).  The tradeoff among different operation purposes manifests in temporal hierarchy of reservoir records. (WRR)
• Opportunities for reservoir re-operation? As simple as catch the last storm before dry season, as complex as detailed quantification of benefit, risk and evaporation loss. (ERL)

Agricultural Irrigation

Agricultural irrigation is the largest consumptive water use sector, yet our understanding on its magnitude, timing, and impacts on terrestrial water cycle is still limited.  We work on different aspect, monitoring, modeling and management, of irrigation to improve the representation of irrigation in hydrologic models and inform policy for sustainable irrigation development.

• The US population center is moving toward east and south, while the center of mass of agricultural irrigation water use is moving towards east.  What are the drivers of the decoupling of food consumption and water for food? (ERL)
• Machine learning methods demonstrate the spatial and temporal transferability to detect farmers irrigation behavior by relating land surface characteristics to in-situ irrigation records. (RS).
• Groundwater-fed irrigation change streamflow components and variability signature as a results of streamflow depletion and irrigation return flow (HESS).
• Engineering infrastructure and natural-based solutions are combined to facilitate irrigation adaptation to changing climate by navigating through climate variability, environmental sustainability and financial feasibility (JWRPM, featured in ASCE Drought Management Selections).

Evaporation Temporal Variance Decomposition – ETVarD

ETVarD is a theorical framework derived from conservation law and Budyko hypothesis to quantify evapotranspiration variability from various climatic and catchment storage sources. 

ETVarD provides an analytical benchmark to constrain and reconcile data from multi-source, multi-variable hydrologic observations and hydrologic models (e.g., Noah, VIC, Mosaic, Noah-MP).  Beyond the match between observation and simulation, ETVarD demonstrates how to advance our knowledge through the congruence among theory-model-observation. (Picture from global basins, Trinity, CONUS)

• Derivation of ETVarD (ADWR)
• Evaporation inter- and intra-annual variability study in global basins (GRL)
• Theory-model-observation congruence (WRR)

Agricultural Tile Drainage

Agricultural tile drainage systems in intensively managed low relief landscape in the Midwest have changed the flow path, however, there are not explicitly represented in hydrologic models. 

We aim at fill the information and knowledge gaps between field scale anthropogenic alteration and watershed scale environmental responses (hydrology, nutrients, sediments). This agricultural infrastructure has the potential to be re-engineered for water and fertilizer recycle/recovery, environmental conservation and climate change adaptation. (On-going)

Green hydrogen production for future carbon neutral society

We are accessing the infrastructure readiness, policy barriers and system synergies of green hydrogen production.  Details in Global Hydrogen Production Technologies (HyPT) Center.