Page 18 - 2020 GGE Newsletter

Page 18

A NOTE FROM THE HYDROLOGY GROUP
WRITTEN BY ANNA RYKEN, PHD CANDIDATE UNDER REED MAXWELL
Despite the craziness of 2020, the
Maxwell Research Group has had a
great year continuing their study of
hydrologic systems. The group also
graduated one student, Mary Mi-
chael Forrester, whose PhD work
focused on the effects of groundwa-
ter model configuration on lower
atmospheric systems. Mary Mi-
chael now works for NASA and
lives in Tennessee.
Anna Ryken is a PhD candidate
hoping to defend her dissertation
this spring. Her work in the East
River Basin is focused on eddy co-
variance observations and model
comparisons. Her work estimates
evapotranspiration (ET) within
the East River Basin using an Monthly evapotranspiration comparison of ParFlow 2014 monthly simulation results with MODIS and
eddy covariance tower and com- SSEBop remote sensing products over valley cells. Only results from ParFlow simulations that match
pares these estimates to mod- GRACE are presented.
eled outputs. She is interested
in understanding the sources of water from
which ET is drawing and whether the catch-
ment is water- or energy-limited. This re-
search can lead to better ET estimates in
complex terrain.

Lauren Thatch is a PhD candidate looking to
defend her dissertation this Spring. Lauren’s
research is centered around improving the
representation of water management pro-
cesses in integrated hydrologic
models. The first part of her dis- Log-scale hydraulic conductivity maps produced using the Darcy analytical method (this study). Maps
sertation work estimated water are a single layer with 1km lateral resolution.
use changes in the California Cen-
tral Valley during the recent historic drought using a synthesis approach with integrated hydrologic modeling and remote sensing data from
the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) remote sensing data. Currently Lauren is assessing the importance of model resolu-
tion when using integrated hydrologic models to evaluate irrigation and groundwater pumping activities.
Danielle Tijerina is continuing her PhD work on intercomparing continental-scale hydrologic models over the continental United States. She
was able to present the results of the intercomparison at the 2019 American Geophysical Union meeting, where she won an Outstanding Stu-
dent Presentation Award. Danielle will continue her research, and her PhD, with Dr. Maxwell at Princeton University, where she started clas-
ses this fall. There, she is interested in applying continental scale hydrologic models to better understand the impacts of climate-change in-
duced land use and land cover change on the water cycle. She will also continue to work with collaborators on the NSF HydroFrame project to
make continental-scale model data more accessible to other modelers, scientists, and educators.
Jackson Swilley is in his second year as a Masters student and will defend his thesis this spring, March 2021. He has been working to analyti-
cally estimate and map hydraulic conductivity, K, at high-resolution over the contiguous United States (CONUS). Additionally, he is validat-
ing these K data products in the Upper Colorado River Basin by way of integrated hydrologic modeling. He is comparing modeled groundwa-
ter depths and streamflows to observed values and assessing the relative performance of a suite of hydraulic conductivity maps. Preliminary
results show that analytically-derived K products validate well in comparison to published geology-informed hydraulic conductivity maps.
Other highlights:
Kamini Singha:

Sawyer McFadden, MS Hydrology, received a 2020 Geological Society of America Graduate Student Research Grant
Alexis Navarre-Sitchler:
Elizabeth Andrews, PhD Candidate - Los Alamos National Laboratory Center for Nonlinear Studies Fellowship