event
Friday 15 Nov 2019: Coordination in large-scale models in water resources engineering: challenges for water resilience
Dr Charles Rouge - University of Sheffield
Harrison 170 14:30-15:30
Abstract:
Complex, large-scale models in water resources engineering are increasingly needed to answer pressing questions on the resilience of coupled human and natural systems to natural hazards – e.g., floods and droughts. Uncertainties abound on the nature and magnitude of future hazards, as well as on the state of the infrastructure, technologies, ecosystems and societies these threats will impact. To address these questions requires the integration of natural and anthropic processes at a range of scales.
This high-stakes modelling challenge presents opportunities for better-informed and more cooperative decision-making from key actors to improve outcomes. A preliminary step towards achieving this is to understand whether model representations of current cooperative arrangements in a water system are fit-for-purpose for resilience assessments. In other words, do they accurately represent vulnerabilities in these systems? This seminar will illustrate how model diagnostic can answer this question by focusing on how commonly employed representations of reservoir operations in large-scale hydrological models can influence our appraisal of water-related extremes. It will use the state-of-the-art representation of reservoirs contained in the Water Balance Model (WBM), a high-profile large-scale hydrological model, applied to a reservoir cascade in the Upper Snake River Basin in the American West. Results demonstrate the importance of understanding where operational coordination plays a crucial role in avoiding or mitigating water-related extremes, and which data should inform it.
Biography:
Dr Charles Rouge completed an engineering degree at France's Ecole Polytechnique near Paris, then his MSc in Civil Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA) in 2010. He did his PhD in complexity science at Universite Blaise Pascal (Clermont-Ferrand, France), before moving into research positions at top institutions in Canada, the UK and the USA, working on diverse water projects ranging from resilience and vulnerability assessments in the Middle-East and the American West, to an appraisal of smart water metering in London. He is now a Lecturer in Water Resilience at the University of Sheffield.
