There will be a 7-week Summer Institute at the National Water Center in June-July, 2017, that offers an opportunity for UCGIS graduate students to gain a national perspective on water flow in streams and rivers is now being forecast like weather – in real-time and local scale, all across the continental United States.  The National Water Model synthesizes continental scale geospatial data, high performance computing and numerical weather prediction.  Another challenge is how to provide access to citizens and emergency responders of this vast volume of forecast information.  The speakers will provide insights into the hydrology (Maidment), GIS components (Wang) and student experience at the 2016 Summer Institute (Michael Johnson).  Students contribute to advancements in the National Water Model through group projects with students from other institutions and disciplinary backgrounds. This is an opportunity to contribute to a grand challenge project and to gain a broad perspective of a field critical to human welfare where geography provides a connectivity across disciplines and communities in the nation.

Presenters:

David R. Maidment is the Hussein M. Alharthy Centennial Chair in Civil Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin where he has been on the faculty since 1981. Dr Maidment is a specialist in surface water hydrology, and in particular in the application of geographic information systems to hydrology.

Shaowen Wang is a professor of Geography and Geographic Information Science (Primary), Computer Science, Library and Information Science, and Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), where he is named a Centennial Scholar. He is also an Associate Director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and Founding Director of UIUC’s CyberGIS Center for Advanced Digital and Spatial Studies. He is the President of UCGIS, and a current member of the Board on Earth Sciences and Resources of the U.S. National Academies.

Mike Johnson is a second-year graduate student in the UCSB Geography Department under Dr. Keith Clarke. Mike's undergraduate degree is in Geography and Anthropology with minors in Water Resource Management, GIS Applications, Economics, Statistics and Environmental Studies from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. He participated in the 2016 Summer Institute and helped develop a framework for connecting predictive model outputs, citizens, and emergency responders through GIS and social media.

You can find a recording of this webinar on our YouTube UCGIS Webinar Channel.