Research
Research statement
Imagine the amazing good fortune of the generation that gets to see the end of the world. This is as marvelous as being there in the beginning. - Jean Baudrillard, Fragments
Winter is coming. Climate change has pushed the hydrological cycle of the earth out of statistical stationarity. We are frequently observing unprecedented floods and droughts. Improving the resilience of urban and environmental hydrosystems to these new stressors is crucial for effective risk management strategies.
Because process-based mechanistic models can predict the hydrosystem's response to previously unobserved extrema, these models can be used to predict the impact of climate change on these systems. The results of such model runs give insight into the hydrosystem's inner working and help to develop strategies to increase its resilience. The challenge of applying such models is that they must consider a broad range of interacting processes, which is numerically difficult and makes them computationally expensive. However, current abundance of computational resources makes running data-rich, large scale simulations of complex hydrosystems possible.
Given the environmental impact of such expensive computational models, it is important to use them consciously. Data-rich, high-resolution model runs are valuable to explore scientific hypotheses and deepen fundamental process understanding. My research interest is in computational methods for environmental fluid mechanics that fully leverage available computer resources and data sets to study the resilience of urban and environmental hydrosystems. I further use the insight gained by computationally expensive model runs to develop reduced models that can give the same information for less computational effort.
Research interests
Generally speaking, I'm interested in theoretical and computational fluid mechanics, applied linear algebra, and a subset of earth science that relates to water flow.
In specific keywords, my research interests are:
- Environmental and geophysical fluid mechanics
- High-performance scientific computing
- Crisis hydroinformatics
Current work
My current research focuses on modelling flow in the hydrosphere.
Environmental fluid mechanics:
- Numerical studies of climate change impact on water resources in a subcatchment of East River Watershed, Colorado, USA.
- Cattaneo's relaxation applied to governing equations in hydrological modelling.
- Discontinuous Galerkin method for shallow water flow.
High-performance scientific computing:
- Multiresolution mesh generation based on wavelet analysis of different catchment characteristics for multi-objective integrated hydro-biogeochemical simulation runs.
- Portable high-performance parallel computing for environmental flow simulations. Targeting heterogeneous architectures through the Kokkos framework.
Codes
I contribute to the following research codes:
- Hydroinformatics Modeling System (hms), Technische Universitat Berlin: A shallow water flow code that explores modularity and flexibility in scientific software design.
- Simulation Environment for Geomorphology, Hydrodynamics and Ecohydrology in Integrated form (SERGHEI), Forschungszentrum Julich, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory: Portable high-performance shallow water flow code targeting supercomputers.
- TINerator, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory: A mesh generator to create extruded unstructured meshes for hydro-environmental models.
Collaborators
- D. Caviedes-Voullieme, Forschungszentrum Jülich
- D. Dwivedi, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
- G. Kesserwani, University of Sheffield
- Z. Li, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
- M. Morales-Hernandez, Universidad de Zaragoza
- S. Molins-Rafa, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
- A. Navas-Montilla, Centro Universitario de la Defensa
Projects
- DOE-funded: Scientific Focus Area: Watershed Function
- DOE-funded: Interoperable Design of Extreme-scale Application Software: Watersheds
Last updated: Mon Oct 11 18:48:16 2021