Projects


Current Projects


ACESS: Anthropogenic water management, Climate Change, and Environmental Sustainability in the Southwestern US (National Science Foundation; 2021 – 2024):
  • Sustainability of water and environmental systems in the water-stressed southwestern US under climate change, increased water demands, and intensified climate extremes.
  • Focuses on the role of water management in mitigation future water stress and environmental sustainability.
BLUEGEM: Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: Biosphere and Land Use Exchanges with Groundwater and soils in Earth system Models  (National Science Foundation and Belmont Forum; 2021  – 2024):
  • Global to local scale interactions among soils, irrigation, groundwater and societies.
  • Includes strong stakeholder engagement and integration of biophysical (e.g., Earth system modeling, human impacts) and socio-economic (e.g., social survey, participatory mapping) components.
CAREER: Humans, Water, and Climate: Advancing Research and Education on Water Resource Sustainability in Managed Land-Water Systems using an Integrated Hydrological Modeling Framework (NSF CAREER, 2018-2023) (See MSU News):
  • Understanding human-hydrology interactions in managed landscapes.
Assessing cumulative impacts of dams on distant wetland dynamics and the livelihoods of local communities in the Lower Mekong River Basin (NASA LCLUC, 2018-2022) (See MSU News):
  • Local-scale impacts of dams in the Lower Mekong River basin.
Hydropower Development and Sustainable Water Resource Management in the Mekong River Basin (NASA IDS, 2017-2022) (See MSU News):
  • Hydrological, agricultural, and ecological impacts of dam construction in the Mekong River basin.
Sustainable Hydropower Development in the Amazon River Basin (NSF-INFEWS, 2016-2021):
  • The goal of the project is to model Amazon Basin hydrology coupled to climate and landscape factors in a systems model that captures the influence of changes in climate, land use, and placement of dams suggested by the hydrological modeling, the hydro-engineering and the local knowledge of communities.
  • The model we use is Leaf-Hydro-Flood.
The Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project-2 (ISIMIP-2) (European Union, 2014~):
  • This is a community-driven international model intercomparison project.
  • Our group participates with the HiGW-MAT model, which is one of the models participating for the Water Sector of ISIMIP-2.
  • Th goal of the project is to provide a comprehensive and consistent picture of the world under different climate-change scenarios

Past Projects

High-resolution Continental-scale Hydrological Modeling including Human Activities (MSU, 2015-2019):
  • The project goal is to understand the role of human activities on continental US hydrology.
  • The objectives are to realistically simulate human activities in a high resolution hydrological model and to incorporate site-specific data into a large-scale modeling framework.
  • As a part of ongoing efforts, we are improving reservoir operation and implementing river-flood routing scheme, which enables dynamic reservoir extent.
  • The model: Leaf-Hydro-Flood.
Global-scale Crop, Irrigation, and Groundwater Modeling using CLM (MSU, 2016-2020):
  • The goal of this project is to improve CLM irrigation parameterizations to better simulate irrigation impacts on global water and energy cycles using the emerging data on irrigation.
  • Assimilation of satellite data into the CLM irrigation scheme is one of the key project objectives.
  • This project also investigates the crop-groundwater interactions in the stressed agro-ecosystems around the world. A detailed crop model is coupled with CLM in this step.
  • Model: CLM.
Regional Human-Climate Interactions in Semi-Arid Environment (MSU-WaterCube, 2015-2017):
  • The overall project goal is to advance the understanding of human-climate (or human-nature) interactions in semi-arid environment.
  • The specific objective is to examine the impacts of human water use (such as irrigation) on regional climate, water resources, and the environment.
  • The project integrates remote-sensing and in-situ observations into a regional climate model to study human-climate interactions, examine hydro-climatic impacts of land-water management, and conduct comparative studies of Heihe river basin, China and the Great Plains.
  • Model: WRF and WRF-Hydro.

Others:
  • Modeling the impacts of anthropogenic activities on the global terrestrial water cycle.
  • High-resolution modeling of the water cycle in the US: Human-induced and Climatic drivers of change.
  • Modeling groundwater depletion in the High Plains and Central Valley aquifers.