In today’s RHESSys lab meeting, Aubrey Dugger presented the work she has been doing utilizing tree ring data to validate her RHESSys model runs in the Santa Fe municipal watershed, and Ian McCullough presented the work he will be doing in the Tejon watershed utilizing tree ring data. We were fortunate to have Tom Swetnam, director of the laboratory of tree ring research at the University of Arizona College of Science, as a guest at our lab meeting today to give his feedback on their work and share his expertise on using tree ring data with us. Tom also presented at last week’s Bren colloquium – “Reaping the Whirlwind: Wildfire and Climate Change in the Western United States”.
BioEarth Meeting
Naomi Tague and Elizabeth Garcia are attending the BioEarth Stakeholder meeting at the University of Washington in Pullman, Washington, this week. RHESSys is one of the models integrated into the BioEarth framework with the goal of creating a regional modeling framework for the Pacific Northwest to improve understanding of the interactions among carbon, nitrogen, and water at the regional scale in the context of global change, to inform decision makers’ strategies regarding natural and agricultural resource management.
For more information, please visit the BioEarth site
WFire Integration Meeting
Naomi Tague met with Don McKenzie and Maureen Kennedy (University of Washington) in Seattle about the integration of a fire model into RHESSys. They plan to move forward with testing the integration on individual fires and fire regimes in the Northwest and Southwest US, and are planning on there being a working version this Fall.
Congratulations Taehee!
Congratulations to Taehee Hwang (postdoctoral associate at UNC Chapel Hill), who just accepted a faculty position in the Geography Department at Indiana University. Taehee has been a valuable collaborator with our ecohydrology lab, and we hope he will continue to be in the future. All the best to you Taehee in your new venture!
Watershed Science Masterclass
Naomi Tague was part of a team with Jeff McDonnell (University of Saskatchewan), Peter Troch (University of Arizona), and Richard Hooper (executive directory of CUAHSU), who taught this week-long course focusing on hydrologic and biogeochemical watershed processes, including theory, experimental design, and modeling.
Dr. Tague taught about cutting edge concepts in hydrologic modeling, including innovative ways of linking new measurements (isotopes, remote sensing) with models, ways of accounting for uncertainty in models – and computer science based tools that support community model development.
The course was held at Biosphere2, which includes the Landscape Evolution Observatory (LEO) where three huge model hillslopes are constructed inside an environmentally controlled greenhouse facility. Students had the opportunity to run an experiment with LEO, including doing some cool experiments (adding rain and really tracking how the water moves) and analyzing data collected from hillsope experiments.
For more photos, see the album on our facebook page
Biosphere2
Landscape Evolution Observatory
CUAHSI
New Publication! RHESSys used for research in the Spanish Pyrenees
Dr. Tague worked with with researches at the Pyrenean Institute of Ecology using RHESSys in the first simulations of combined land cover and climate change in the hydrology of the Pyrenees and the management of a Pyrenean reservoir under future scenarios.
J.I. López-Moreno, J. Zabalza, S.M. Vicente-Serrano, J. Revuelto, M. Gilaberte, C. Azorin-Molina, E. Morán-Tejeda, J.M. García-Ruiz, C. Tague. 2013. Impact of climate and land use change on water availability and reservoir management: Scenarios in the Upper Aragón River, Spanish Pyrenees. Science of the Total Environment, S0048-9697(13)01069-3, doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2013.09.031
Access the paper
AGU 2013 meeting presentations and posters
If you’re interested in seeing what we’ve been up to, please come check out our research at the upcoming Fall AGU meeting December 9-13, 2013 in San Francisco.
View the schedule of our presentations and posters AGUschedule2013
Presentation at Cornell University
Dr. Tague gave an invited lecture as part of Cornell University’s “Cross-scale Biogeochemistry and Climate”, IGERT (Integrated Graduate Education, Research and Training in the Cross-Scale Biogeochemical Drivers and Feedbacks to Climate Change). http://www.biogeo.cornell.edu/index.shtml
Lecture title: “Vegetation water stress in a warming climate: An integrated modeling perspective”.
See the presentation
2014 Watershed Science Master Course
This week long watershed science course held at Biosphere2 in January is open to graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, and professionals. Dr. Tague will be teaching a section on modeling. To download the flyer:
2014WatershedScienceCourse_flyer
For more information:
http://www.cuahsi.org/watershed-master-class.aspx
RHESSys Hackathon!
A collaborative effort including software engineers, scientists, and researchers to improve RHESSys functionality and usability. Participants in the hackathon included researchers from RENCI (Renaissance Computing Institute), the Institute for the Environment at UNC Chapel Hill, WSSI collaborators from the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) at the University of Maryland and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and of course the chief RHESSys architect Dr. Naomi Tague.
The Tague Team Lab 