Constructed wetlands most effective for reducing watershed scale nitrogen and sediment loads

July 6, 2021 - Wetlands constructed along waterways are the most cost-effective way to reduce nitrate and sediment loads in large streams and rivers, according to scientists at the University of California, Irvine, University of Kansas, the University of Minnesota and other institutions. Rather than focusing on individual farms, the experts suggest conservation efforts should be implemented at the watershed scale.

For a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team relied on computer modeling to examine the Le Sueur River Basin in southern Minnesota, a watershed subject to runoff from intense agricultural production of corn and soybeans - crops characteristic of the entire Upper Midwest region.

Read more here

Professor Efi Foufoula-Georgiou been awarded the 2021 Community Surface Dynamics Modeling System (CSDMS) Lifetime Achievement Award.

March 23, 2021 - Professor Foufoula-Georgiou has been a pioneer in developing mathematical theory and applying innovative data analysis methods to understand Earth-surface dynamics. Her work has led the community in learning to unlock the potential of the ongoing Earth-data revolution and demonstrated the powerful insights that can be achieved.

Read more here

Markham Hislop interviews Prof. Antonios Mamalakis, Colorado State University, about his recently published co-authored paper, "Zonally contrasting shifts of the tropical rain belt in response to climate change," in the journal Nature.

Watch the interview here

By 2100, billions of people are at risk of facing more flooding, higher temperatures and less food and water.

January 24, 2021 - A new study published in "Nature Climate Change" found that the climate change will cause the Earth's tropical rain belt to unevenly shift in areas that cover almost two-thirds of the world, potentially threatening environmental safety and food security for billions of people.

Read more here

A new study suggests a potential change in tropical rain belt patterns could threaten the livelihoods and food security of billions of people.

January 22, 2021 - Today, the tropical rain belt brings with it heavy precipitation along the equator, but as different parts of Earth's atmosphere heat up at different rates, this belt looks likely to become disrupted as it gets attracted to warmer regions of air - threatening biodiversity and taking away the water that people rely on, including growing crops.

Read more here

A video summary of our new study on the effect of future climate change on the position of the tropical rain belt, published in Nature Climate Change

Watch the video here

Difference by the year 2100 expected to impact global biodiversity, food security

January 18, 2021 - Future climate change will cause a regionally uneven shifting of the tropical rain belt - a narrow band of heavy precipitation near the equator - according to researchers at the University of California, Irvine and other institutions. This development may threaten food security for billions of people.

In a study published today in Nature Climate Change, the interdisciplinary team of environmental engineers, Earth system scientists and data science experts stressed that not all parts of the tropics will be affected equally. For instance, the rain belt will move north in parts of the Eastern Hemisphere but will move south in areas in the Western Hemisphere.

Read more here

New technique could help authorities conduct triage in multiple-blaze scenarios

September 17, 2019 - An interdisciplinary team of scientists at the University of California, Irvine has developed a new technique for predicting the final size of a wildfire from the moment of ignition.

Built around a machine learning algorithm, the model can help in forecasting whether a blaze is going to be small, medium or large by the time it has run its course – knowledge useful to those in charge of allocating scarce firefighting resources. The researchers’ work is highlighted in a study published today in the International Journal of Wildland Fire.

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Smyth makes the point that “there’s a lot of data out there — we need more people bringing it together and using it.”

September 12, 2019 - Back in 2016, Chancellor’s Professor of Computer Science Padhraic Smyth was principal investigator of a multidisciplinary team awarded a five-year, $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) through its National Research Traineeship (NRT) program. The funds were used to develop UCI’s Machine Learning and Physical Sciences (MAPS) program, which trains and supports graduate students from both the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) and the School of Physical Sciences. The goal is to prepare students working at the intersection of machine learning and the physical sciences to realize the potential of today’s massive scientific data sets while tackling real-world problems.

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November 21, 2018 - Water supplies in the southwestern United States largely depend on winter precipitation. Predicting seasonal rain and snowfall is becoming more difficult, however, as climate change causes precipitation patterns to vary. A new study provides evidence of a strong correlation between late-summer to fall sea-surface temperatures off the coast of New Zealand and winter precipitation in the southwestern U.S. — a correlation that could help provide earlier and more reliable forecasts for the southwestern U.S., and improve water resource and ecosystem management in the region.

Read more here on page 18.

The discovery by UCI scientists of a new way to predict winter rainfall in the southwest U.S. inspired them to start a new project to combine data science and climate research.

September 11, 2018 - Investigators from UCI’s Henry Samueli School of Engineering, Donald Bren School of Information & Computer Science, and School of Physical Sciences will work together in a new initiative, funded by the National Science Foundation, to perfect the use of data science in climate studies. The Transdisciplinary Research in Principles of Data Science plus Climate project includes collaborators from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Chicago.

Read more here.

A new collaboration will develop data science tools to find long-distance weather patterns, improving our understanding of global climate.

September 11, 2018 - The El Niño/La Niña pattern in the Pacific Ocean is notorious for its long-distance effects on weather as far away as Africa and the Midwestern United States. But climate experts also know of several other such patterns, known as “teleconnections,” and believe that there are many more to be discovered.

The new TRIPODS+Climate project, a collaboration among the University of Chicago, University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of California-Irvine, will develop novel data science tools to sniff out these hidden patterns, improving weather forecasts and scientific understanding of global climate. Researchers will apply data science methods such as machine learning, network analysis and predictive modeling to the growing flood of climate data.

Read more here.

September 10, 2018 - Understanding the factors that determine regional climate variability and change is a challenge with important implications for the economy, security, and environmental sustainability of many regions around the globe. Our understanding and modeling of the large-scale dynamics of the Earth climate system and associated regional-scale climate variability significantly affects our ability to predict and mitigate climatic extremes and hazards. Earth observations and climate model outputs are witnessing an unprecedented increase in data volume, creating new opportunities to advance climate science but also leading to new data science challenges that must be addressed using tools from mathematics, statistics, and computer science. This project focuses on two central challenges at the heart of modern data-enabled climate science: (1) Increasing the predictive capacity of subseasonal forecasts by discovering and quantifying the sources of (un)predictability, including known and emergent climate modes and their interactions and non-stationarities; and (2) Understanding and quantifying the intricate space-time dynamics of the climate system to provide guidance for climate model assessment and regional forecasting. This project brings together an interdisciplinary team that combines expertise in both hydroclimate science and statistical machine learning to create new platforms for climate diagnostics and prognostics. The broader impacts of an enhanced knowledge of the climate system and robust and accurate seasonal forecasts have wide-ranging implications for society as a whole. For example, better seasonal forecasts will allow water resource managers to make sustainable decisions for water allocation.

Read more here.

Scientists discovered that the temperature of a patch of water on the other side of the world can help predict how dry winters will be in the Southwest

July 11, 2018 - Researchers are starting to shy away from using the word “drought” to describe the miserable precipitation the American Southwest has seen in recent years. Instead, we should think of the dry conditions as the new normal. And in a future with less water, predicting just how little rain or snowfall to expect is increasingly important. That’s why scientists are so worked up about a patch of water off the coast of New Zealand.

A new study in the journal Nature Communications looked at 66 years of worldwide sea-surface temperature data and found an interhemispheric “bridge” that links warmer water in the southwestern Pacific Ocean with drier winters in parts of the Southwest. Researchers have named this connection the New Zealand Index (NZI), and it means scientists may have found the atmospheric equivalent of a crystal ball that will allow them to predict precipitation in the southwestern United States.

The connection between the two regions is made by air rising from the ocean nearby New Zealand and cycling north to waters around the Philippines, causing a change in sea temperatures there. As ocean waters heat up, they alter storm patterns, robbing some of the most already-parched regions in the United States—Southern California, Arizona, Utah, and Nevada—of much-needed winter rain and snowfall.

What’s so exciting about this discovery is the NZI’s effectiveness. When the study’s lead author, Antonios Mamalakis, a graduate student in civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Irvine, looked at data collected for the past 40 years, he found the connection to be about 85 percent consistent in predicting precipitation. “This is the most important practical finding of our work,” Mamalakis says.

Read more here.

Scientists recently proved that, when it comes to predicting the weather, it really is a small world after all.

Watch video here.

Scientists find new 'teleconnection' for early and accurate precipitation prediction.

June 13, 2018 - Variability in El Niño cycles was long considered a reliable tool for predicting winter precipitation in the Southwest United States, but its forecasting power has diminished in recent years. In a study published today in Nature Communications, National Science Foundation (NSF)-supported scientists at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), have found a new method to project wet or dry conditions for the winter ahead.

"Influences between the hemispheres promise earlier and more accurate prediction of winter precipitation in California and the Southwest U.S.," said study co-author Efi Foufoula-Georgiou of UCI. "Knowing how much rain to expect in the coming winter is crucial for the economy, water security, and ecosystem management of the region."

Added Tom Torgersen, director of NSF's Water, Sustainability and Climate Program, which funded the research, "Predicting drought in the Southwest U.S. is a critical issue for food production and local economies. The discovery of an interhemispheric bridge that influences the U.S. winter jet stream holds the promise of improved precipitation predictability and drought forecasts."

The researchers call the new 'teleconnection' the New Zealand Index (NZI) because the sea surface temperature anomaly that triggers it begins in July and August in the southwestern Pacific Ocean near New Zealand.

Read more here.

UCI scientists find new teleconnection for early and accurate precipitation prediction.

June 13, 2018 - El Niño was long considered a reliable tool for predicting future precipitation in the southwestern United States, but its forecasting power has diminished in recent cycles, possibly due to global climate change. In a study published today in Nature Communications, scientists and engineers at the University of California, Irvine demonstrate a new method for projecting wet or dry weather in the winter ahead.

“The interhemispheric teleconnection that we have discovered promises earlier and more accurate prediction of winter precipitation in California and the southwestern U.S.,” said study co-author Efi Foufoula-Georgiou, UCI Distinguished Professor of civil & environmental engineering. “Knowing how much rain to expect in the coming winter is crucial for the economy, water security and ecosystem management of the region.”

The researchers called the new teleconnection the New Zealand Index, because the sea surface temperature anomaly that triggers it begins in July and August in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, close to New Zealand. As the sea surface temperature in the region cools down or heats up, it causes a change in the southern Hadley cell, an atmospheric convection zone from the equator to about the 30th parallel south.

This prompts a commensurate anomaly east of the Philippine Islands, which, in turn, results in a strengthening or weakening of the jet stream in the Northern Hemisphere, having a direct influence on the amount of rain that falls on California between November and March.

“With the New Zealand Index, we can predict from late summer the likelihood of above- or below-normal winter precipitation in the southwestern U.S., with a correlation in the order of 0.7 – compared to the El Niño-Southern Oscillation technique, which has a correlation around 0.3 to 0.4,” said lead author Antonios Mamalakis, a UCI graduate student in civil & environmental engineering. “Our research also shows an amplification of this newly discovered teleconnection over the past four decades.”

Read more here.

Distinction honors contributions to research, education and practice

February 8, 2018 - Two University of California, Irvine faculty members have been elected to the National Academy of Engineering, one of the highest professional distinctions accorded to those pursuing research, education and applications in engineering and technical fields. Efi Foufoula-Georgiou, Distinguished Professor of civil & environmental engineering, and Judith Olson, professor emerita of information & computer sciences, are among 83 new U.S.-based NAE members.

“The success of our academic enterprise is singularly dependent on the quality of our faculty,” said Enrique Lavernia, UCI provost and executive vice chancellor. “With the election of these two outstanding faculty members to the National Academy of Engineering, UCI is now home to 76 members of the esteemed National Academies of Sciences, Engineering & Medicine and American Academy of Arts & Sciences.”

The NAE citation noted Foufoula-Georgiou’s contributions to hydrology and hydroclimatology with applications to engineered systems across scales. Since joining The Henry Samueli School of Engineering in 2016, Foufoula-Georgiou has released groundbreaking research findings on topics ranging from regional climate and extreme heat events to river delta dynamics. She is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and is a member of the European Academy of Sciences.

“I am humbled by this great honor,” Foufoula-Georgiou said. “Such recognition fuels even more of my passion and enthusiasm for impactful research and a commitment to propel my colleagues and students to reach their very best”.

Read more here.

February 2018 - The article "High spatiotemporal resolution of river planform dynamics from Landsat: The RivMAP toolbox and results from the Ucayali River", published in Earth and Space Science, was one of the journal's top 10 most downloaded papers! As of year-end 2017 the article has received 909 downloads.

"Wetland complexes" in a watershed are very effective in reducing nitrate.

January 29, 2018 - In agricultural regions such as the U.S. Midwest, excess nitrate from crop fertilizer makes its way into rivers and streams through subsurface drainage channels and agricultural ditches.

High nitrate concentrations in waterways can be harmful to ecosystems and human health, contaminating drinking water and eventually flowing downstream far enough to increase the size of the Gulf of Mexico's "dead zone".

A study published today in the journal Nature Geoscience by National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded researchers offers new insights into this problem: Multiple wetlands, or "wetland complexes" in a watershed, are extremely effective at reducing nitrate levels in rivers and streams.

Read more here.

January 26, 2018 - LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Scorching summer days are growing hotter in the world’s big cities at a significantly faster pace than the average rise in world temperatures - a trend that could mean more deadly urban heatwaves in years ahead, scientists said.

In cities such as Paris, Houston, Moscow and Beijing, the level of heat on the hottest summer days is growing two or three times as quickly as general temperature rises linked to climate change over the last 50 years, said researchers at the University of California-Irvine.

The trend is particularly pronounced in Europe, East Asia and parts of Australia, they said in a report released this week in the journal Earth’s Future.

Read more here.

January 24, 2018 - While Earth’s average annual temperature has increased at a steady pace in recent decades, there has been an alarming jump in the severity of the hottest days of the year during that same period, with the most lethal effects in the world’s largest cities.

Engineers at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) have learned that urban centers with more than 5 million inhabitants and parts of Eurasia and Australia have been hardest hit by the accelerated growth in short-term, extreme-heat events, resulting in lost lives, reduced agricultural productivity and damage to infrastructure.

In a new study published in Earth’s Future, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, researchers report their analysis of temperature readings from the most recent 50- and 30-year periods rules out the possibility that natural climate variability is to blame for the mercury rising.

Read more of this interview here.

November 20, 2017 - The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has awarded the distinction of fellow to two UC Irvine engineering professors − Efi Foufoula-Georgiou and Lizhi Sun − in recognition of their efforts toward advancing science applications that are deemed scientifically or socially distinguished. Foufoula-Georgiou and Sun are among 10 UCI faculty receiving the designation this year.

As a member of the AAAS Section on Atmospheric & Hydrospheric Sciences, Foufoula-Georgiou, Distinguished Professor of civil and environmental engineering and associate dean of research and innovation, was elected for her seminal contributions to the field of surface hydrology and hydroclimatology, and her unselfish leadership in promoting Earth sciences.

“I am honored and humbled by this recognition, which I proudly share with all my former and current students, postdoctoral associates and collaborators,” said Foufoula-Georgiou. “I am also proud to be part of UCI’s excellent team in hydrologic sciences and engineering, an area whose importance is ever increasing under environmental sustainability concerns due to climate and human-induced change. Driving the discovery and innovation needed for solutions is not easy, and UCI has an important role to play”.

Read more here.

Landforms ‘self-organize’ to withstand human and natural disturbances

October 18, 2017 - River deltas, with their intricate networks of waterways, coastal barrier islands, wetlands and estuaries, often appear to have been formed by random processes, but scientists at the University of California, Irvine and other institutions see order in the apparent chaos.

Through field studies and mathematical modeling, they have concluded that deltas “self-organize” to increase the number, direction and size – or diversity – of sediment transport pathways to the shoreline, boosting their ability to withstand human disturbances and naturally occurring factors. The research team’s findings have been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“With their entangled channels that split and rejoin multiple times before entering the sea, deltas are amazingly complex and varied, leading us to wonder if they’re hiding some simpler order,” said lead author Alejandro Tejedor, research associate in UCI’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “Could there be some common ‘goal’ on the part of deltas to sustain their existence by diversifying the spread of their fluxes to build land on their way to the ocean?”

The researchers sought to solve this riddle by applying statistics and mathematical modeling. Looking at 10 major river deltas around the world, they determined the probability of flows dividing into smaller channels and merging again at confluences, discovering that all but one, the Niger Delta in Africa, exhibited a high “nonlocal entropy rate,” meaning a large diversity of delivery pathways to the sea.

Read more of this interview here.

May 2017 - Research by Czuba, J.A., E. Foufoula-Georgiou, K. Gran, P. Belmont, and P. Wilcock on Interplay between Spatially-Explicit Sediment Sourcing, Hierarchical River-Network Structure, and In-Channel Bed-Material Sediment Transport and Storage Dynamics has made the cover of the Journal of Geophysical Research - Earth Surface volume 122, issue 5.

February 2017 - Research by Schwenk, J., A. Khandelwal, M. Fratkin, V. Kumar, and E. Foufoula-Georgiou on High spatio-temporal resolution of river planform dynamics from Landsat: the RivMAP toolbox and results from the Ucayali River has made the cover of Earth and Space Science volume 4, issue 2.

December 19, 2016 - Efi Foufoula-Georgiou, an expert in hydrology and water resources, recently joined the University of California, Irvine as a Distinguished Professor of civil and environmental engineering. After nearly three decades at the University of Minnesota, with her research laboratory perched atop a waterfall on the Mississippi River, she moved to a region suffering from a severe drought, but the native of Greece is not complaining.

“I love it here. The research environment is vibrant, the collegiality inspiring, and UCI is at the cusp of unprecedented academic and intellectual growth. And the Mediterranean climate is encoded in my skin. I feel completely at home!” she says. Read more of this interview here.

December 16, 2016 - Today at AGU 2016, Dr. Jon Schwenk from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities presented a poster on his detective work into the secret lives of migrating rivers. Read more of his work here.

October 4, 2016 - The American Meteorological Society (AMS) has awarded Efi Foufoula-Georgiou the Hydrologic Sciences Medal for “her pioneering contributions to the science of hydrometeorology and for visionary and sustained leadership in advancing interdisciplinary hydrologic research.”

A Distinguished Professor in civil and environmental engineering, Foufoula-Georgiou is considered one of the world’s leading hydrologists and water resources engineers. Her research focuses on hydrology and geomorphology, with special attention to scaling theories, multiscale dynamics and space-time modeling of precipitation and landforms. Her innovations have improved predictions of space-time variabilities, as well as the uncertainties of water, sediment and land processes in response to climate and human disturbance.

“I am deeply honored and humbled by the award, and I am particularly proud to see that it recognizes not only my own research but my strong belief and commitment in promoting and enabling interdisciplinary research,” said Foufoula-Georgiou. “I’m looking forward to an exciting journey at UCI.”

Foufoula-Georgiou joined the faculty at the Samueli School of Engineering this fall. She has served on many national and international advisory boards, including the National Academy of Sciences Water Science and Technology Board, the NSF Advisory Council for Geosciences, NASA Earth Sciences Subcommittee and EU advisory boards. She is currently a presidential appointee to the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board and president of American Geophysical Union’s Hydrology Section. She is a recipient of the John Dalton Medal of the European Geophysical Society, AGU’s Hydrological Sciences Award and the AMS Horton Lecturer award. She is a fellow of AGU and AMS and a member of the European Academy of Sciences.

The AMS Hydrologic Sciences Medal is granted annually to researchers who make outstanding contributions to scientific knowledge in hydrology, hydrometeorology and/or hydroclimatology, including interactions between the land surface and the atmosphere.

June 7, 2016 - Although deltas make up just 1 percent of the world's land, they're home to more than half a billion people and to fertile ecosystems such as mangroves and marshes. Deltas also serve as economic hotspots, supporting much of the world's fisheries, forest products, and agriculture, and are food baskets for many nations.

Human actions rob deltas of their lifeblood: water and sediment. On a global scale, people have diverted more than 40 percent of river discharges and 26 percent of river sediments into large reservoirs. Losses of wetlands to development, and the erosion that follows, further deplete deltas of sediment. Sea level rise accelerates the losses. Hurricanes are often the death knell, cutting new channels and washing away huge amounts of mud and sand.

To find out how deltas around the world are faring, Foufoula-Georgiou and her colleagues are studying the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna (GBM) Delta, a vast fan that stretches across Bangladesh into West Bengal, India. Their work is part of the NSF-supported Sustainable Deltas Project. Despite its size, the GBM Delta is foundering. The delta is sinking, with water covering its land surfaces four times faster than sea level is rising. Sediment would normally help build up the delta, but human land use upriver reduces the amount of sediment carried downstream. A further insult comes from shrimp farming, which modifies delta channels and results in yet more loss of land. Almost 150 million people live in the GBM region. Most of them rely on the delta's natural resources, so they, as well as the wildlife that depends on the delta's rich sediment, are literally losing ground. The scene is far from unusual. Much of the sediment has been cut off from deltas across Asia. India has seen a 50 percent reduction for the Brahmani Delta, a 74 percent reduction for the Mahanadi, and a 94 percent reduction for the Krishna... Read more here.

March 15, 2016 - Two PhD students won Outstanding Student Paper Awards (OSPAs) at the 2015 American Geophysical Union's Fall Meeting in San Francisco, California for their presentations:

Zeinab Takbiri (Hydrology Section) - Microwave Signatures of Inundation Area

Jonathan Czuba (Earth and Planetary Surface Processes Focus Group) - Near-Channel Sediment Sources Now Dominate in Many Agricultural Landscapes: The Emergence of River-Network Models to Guide Watershed Management

OSPAs are awarded to promote, recognize and reward undergraduate, Master's and PhD students for quality research in the geophysical sciences. Each year, sections and focus groups recruit judges to assess and score student oral and poster presentations at meetings. Typically the top 3-5% of presenters in each section/focus group are awarded an OSPA. To view all winners see the OPSA page or view the announcement on pages 27-29 of the March 15, 2016 issue of EOS.

Spring 2016 - Professor Efi Foufoula called me in January 2001. She and her colleagues Chris Paola and Gary Parker were in the midst of preparing a multi-year, multi-institutional, multi-million dollar proposal to the National Science Foundation (NSF). Did the Science Museum want to be a partner? Absolutely. Getting a big proposal funded by NSF requires a big idea, and they had one.

Rivers are vital to the physical, economic, social, and cultural well-being of billions of people around the world. And geologists, ecologists and economists have been studying rivers for decades, even centuries. But these academic discipline-driven ways of knowing had never coalesced into a more systemic understanding of rivers, to the detriment of rivers everywhere and the people dependent upon them. So Efi, Chris, and Gary envisioned that their proposed National Center for Earth-surface Dynamics would create a new synthetic science they called earth-process science that would enable multi-disciplinary quantitative understandings of rivers.

As can be imagined, such an ambitious proposal received intense scrutiny and months of review. But we made it through the gauntlet and the National Center for Earth-surface Dynamics (NCED) was established in summer 2002. I got to be one of the principal investigators, not as a scientist, but as the point person tasked with imagining how to bring the research and insights of this big collaborative scientific enterprise with researchers from a dozen campuses to the attention of large public audiences.

It was a great gig. I got to eat with these scientists, drink with them, and visit their research sites. But after engaging in this work for several years, I realized that I was hearing different versions of the same story from different scientists. The geomorphologists told me, “Do you realize that humanity is now the dominant agent of landscape change?” The sedimentologists asked, “Are you aware that humans are now responsible for the movement of more rock and sediment annually than all rivers and glaciers on the planet combined?” And the ecologists stated, “It is no longer possible to study an ecosystem on the surface of this planet without taking human influences into consideration.”

April 2015 - Research by Schwenk, J., S. Lanzoni, and E. Foufoula-Georgiou on The life of a meander bend: connecting shape and dynamics via analysis of a numerical model has made the cover of the Journal of Geophysical Research - Earth Surface volume 120, issue 4.

The engineering roots of hydrology served society well in solving problems of flood control, prediction under limited observations, river basin management, water availability and distribution, and water allocation at the intersection of the natural and built environment. Scientific hydrology over the past two decades has advanced the physical understanding of hydrologic and related processes and their complex interactions and has generalized ideas and frameworks of estimation and prediction. Equipped with the engineering and scientific aspects of a field, hydrologist are in the best possible position to address new challenges related to sustainability of water quantity and quality under increasing stresses of climate and human perturbations while protecting ecosystem services and economic development. The first line of defense in studying a complex system for sustainability (ability to maintain the system integrity and functionality under perturbations) is to identify its vulnerable spots (places, times, processes that are more susceptible to change). Read more here.

October 2014 - Research by Gangodagamage, C., E. Foufoula-Georgiou, and P. Belmont on River basin organization around the mainstem: scale invariance in tributary branching and the incremental area function has made the cover of the Journal of Geophysical Research - Earth Surface volume 119, issue 10.

Oct. 7, 2014 - It may seem strange to raise the implications of climate change brought about by global warming given that last winter was the coldest in several decades in much of the Eastern and Midwestern United States. But with so many recent stories focusing on the global ramifications of a hotter world, it is important we remind ourselves of what climate change really means to Minnesotans.

Increased levels of heat-trapping gases have increased the average global temperature, but this does not always equate to consistent warming at the local level. Climate change-induced shifts in the distribution of heat around the planet can lead to unusually wetter, cooler conditions in some areas yet drier, warmer conditions in others. As we already are experiencing, climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of extreme weather events, including heat waves, droughts, heavy downpours like the ones Minnesota has received and floods. The results can be catastrophic: severe soil erosion, more frequent algae blooms in our lakes, and added costs to maintain transportation and infrastructure. With a vast majority of Minnesotans residing in urban areas with aging infrastructure, cities and suburbs particularly are vulnerable to climate change-related flooding and heat waves... Read more of this OpEd. (Archived link)

Sept. 25, 2014 - A unique initiative endorsed by the International Council for Science - Sustainable Deltas 2015 - (SD2015) was launched at the "Deltas in Times of Climate Change II International Conference" in Rotterdam. The aim of the initiative is to focus attention and research on the value and vulnerability of deltas worldwide, and promote and enhance international and regional cooperation among scientists, policymakers and other stakeholders... Read more about Sustainable Deltas 2015. (Archived link)

Dec. 12, 2012 - The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced that it will award an $720,000 grant to the University of Minnesota to lead an international, multi-university virtual institute for the study of Earth-surface systems, with a special emphasis on watersheds and deltas.

Linked Institutions for Future Earth (LIFE) is a new collaborative network of leading international research institutions, facilities and field sites working together on research related to predicting and understanding the impacts of climatic and human stresses on the landscape. LIFE seeks to produce research that informs policymakers and practitioners, while cultivating effective researcher exchange and mentoring, and generating innovative international public engagement toward landscape sustainability... Read more of this article. (Archived link)

Aug. 30-31, 2012 - Deltas are unquestionably "hot spots" of change in the coastal environment, important for commerce and human habitation, but also vulnerable to human-induced changes from upstream water management, threatened from sea level rise from downstream, and affected by local resource exploration. The importance of deltas for economic development, food security, energy, and mineral exploration, among others, has been articulated in multiple publications, and deltas have been the subject of an increasing number of international meetings over the last decade. In 2011, a group of international researchers proposed to bring deltas to the forefront of public awareness and make them showcases of international collaboration on coastal sustainability by calling for an International Year of Deltas (IYDs) (Foufoula-Georgiou et al., 2011). This effort has been endorsed by several international scientific Unions and academic institutions (http://www.iyds-2013.org/).

Earlier this year, the Belmont Forum, an organization of the world's major and emerging funders of global environmental research, put out a call for proposalsto the international community to foster environmental sustainability research across disciplines and across national borders starting with two main focus themes: freshwater security and coastal vulnerability. A project on "DELTAS" was submitted by a group of researchers from 12 countries and 22 institutions and was invited to be developed to a full proposal which was submitted in December, 2012. In parallel, an effort to develop a Deltas Decadal Initiative (DDI) is currently under way.

The Delta Decadal Initiative (DDI), aims to catalyze the international research and stakeholder communities toward co-developing a framework of research and decision-making based on an integrated modeling approach of the interacting physical-socio-economic factors affecting delta "health". Specifically, a Science Plan to guide the DDI willspell out the integrative research, the data requirements, and the actionable products needed to inform management and decision making for protecting and sustaining the economic and environmental integrity of deltas around the world. Special emphasis will be given on developing: (a) integrated data sets and metrics to assess delta vulnerability; (b) frameworks for data collection and sharing; and (c) models that can be used for scenario building towards informing policy and management. Regional collaboration and engagement with stakeholders is a must and mechanisms for ensuring this will be proposed...

May 9, 2011 - Friends and colleagues share memories in remembrance of George Bugliarello. Read about their memories.

December 2007 - Efi Foufoula-Georgiou received the 2007 Hydrologic Sciences Award at the 2007 AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco, Calif. The award is for outstanding contributions to the science of hydrology. Read more .