CEE Seminar: Application of Remotely Sensed Precipitation Observations for Hydrometeorological Modeling & Analysis

Wednesday, August 31, 2016 - 11:00 a.m. to Thursday, September 1, 2016 - 11:55 a.m.
McDonnell Douglas Engineering Auditorium (MDEA)
Phu Nguyen, Ph.D.

Postdoctoral Scholar
Center for Hydrometeorology & Remote Sensing
Civil & Environmental Engineering Department
University of California, Irvine

Abstract:
In recent years we have been witnessing an increasing number of hydrologic extremes (floods and droughts) globally. Extreme precipitation events have caused major flooding and natural disasters. Prediction and modeling of extreme precipitation events can play a key role in mitigation and management of water resources infrastructures to minimize losses. This presentation introduces applications of satellite precipitation data for flood forecasting, water resources management and climate change understanding. The first part of this presentation describes a coupled hydrologic-hydraulic model named HiResFlood-UCI (Nguyen et al. 2015), which has been developed based on the high-resolution hydraulic model BreZo (by Sanders & Begnudelli) and the distributed hydrologic model HL-RDHM (by NOAA’s NWS) for modelling floods. The model was implemented for flood forecasting in the Cedar River Basin using the global real-time high-resolution (hourly, 4km) remotely sensed precipitation PERSIANN-CCS data. The results show HiResFlood-UCI with realtime PERSIANN-CCS was able to reasonably capture both the observed hydrographs and the flooded maps. This is promising for a global high-resolution flood warning system pairing HiResFlood-UCI with PERSIANN-CCS in the near future.

In the second part of the talk, a new user-friendly climate data-exploration tool called CHRS RainSphere (Nguyen and Sorooshian et al. 2016), which has been developed for use in a range of scientific studies and applications, will be presented. The capabilities of RainSphere as a tool to aid in the education of the general public and promote independent inquisition and discovery of climate studies will be discussed.

Speaker Bio:
Phu Nguyen is a postdoctoral scholar in hydrology & water resources at the Center for Hydrometeorology & Remote Sensing (CHRS), Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering at UC Irvine. He received a bachelor's degree in civil engineering (2003) from Bach Khoa University – HCMC Vietnam, master's in engineering science (2008) from the University of Melbourne and his Ph.D. in civil engineering from UC Irvine (2014). Nguyen’s research interests include flood warnings, global extreme satellite precipitation event database using object-oriented approaches, integrated system for global satellite precipitation and information, and global real-time satellite and crowdsourced precipitation observations for hydrologic and natural disaster management applications.