Soil, Groundwater, Catchments
The goal of this group is to understand and predict the
fluxes and storages of water and solute over a range of space and time
scales. Such understanding is necessary to evaluate the suitability of
the aquatic environment for living organisms.
Integrated
watershed management is the key to global ecosystem sustainability. The
research at the watershed scale should combine ecological, economic,
political, and social factors as well as the natural physical
processes. Our long term goal is to move in the direction of integrated
watershed research.
As modelling has become an important tool
for watershed management, our emphasis is to modify and use existing
watershed models for the understanding of the processes and the
prediction of the climate and management effects on the watershed
behaviour. Watershed processes are, however, complex and for the
purposes of decision making model predictions should be thoroughly
examined. For this reason, we have devoted part of our research to
inverse modelling for estimating model parameters, and to uncertainty
analysis for the assessment of model prediction.
Projects
- An assessment of regional water endowments, water constraints to food production, and implications for virtual water trade in Iran (Karim Abbaspour)
- Modelling groundwater nitrogen contamination in two watersheds in Iran (Samira Akhavan, Phd student)
- Development of calibration and uncertainty analysis techniques for large-scale watershed models (Karim Abbaspour)
- Modeling the effect of soil organic amendments on temporal variability of soil hydrologic chrematistics (Karim Abbaspour), collaboration with Prof. Majid Afyuni, Isfahan University of Technology, Iran)