1) HyDROS is seeking a new undergraduate research assistant. See the flier for required qualifications and how to submit your resume. Undergrad RA Flier

2) WATER Center and HyDROS Lab invite applications for a faculty position to be appointed at the Associate Professor or Professor level in International Water Resources Development at the Climate-Water Nexus (PDF Link) and also Cluster Hiring Link (http://ouesclusterhire.ou.edu).

Graduate student and PhD candidate Race Clark (OU/CIMMS) won 3rd place at the 2015 OU GIS Day poster contest held November 17, 2015 in Norman, OK. His poster was titled “Processing Topographical Data for Hydrological Modeling”, which presented a new software tool for speeding up topographical preprocessing for hydrological models. This software tool is primarily designed for use during international capacity building workshops. His coauthor on the poster is fellow graduate student and PhD candidate Zac Flamig (OU/CIMMS). Both students are advised by Drs. J.J. Gourley (NOAA/NSSL) and Yang Hong (OU Civil and Environmental Engineering).

Race Clark and Galateia Terti were awarded first and second place in the graduate student poster contest at the 40th Annual Meeting of the National Weather Association. This continues an award filled year for the HyDROS group in 2015. The annual meeting was held October 17th-22nd in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Race’s poster was titled “Towards Hazard Services Recommenders for Flash Flood Forecasting” while Galateia presented “Target the warnings: Probabilistic flash flood casualties prediction.”

The NSSL NOXP Radar on location for iPHEX[/caption]Members of the HyDROS team have been involved in the Integrated Precipitation and Hydrology Experiment (IPHEx) to study warm season precipitation and hydrologic response in the complex terrain of western North Carolina. The team has been with NSSL’s NOXP radar to coordinate operations with several other ground-based platforms as well as NASA’s ER-2 and UND’s Citation aircraft. Further, a number of developmental radar-based (MRMS) and hydrologic model-based (FLASH) products are being supplied to the experimental team for research and evaluation. The experiment runs from May 1 – June 15, 2014.

Website hosting MRMS, FLASH, and NOXP products: http://wdssii.nssl.noaa.gov/web/wdss2/products/radar/iphex.shtml
More information about IPHEX can be found here: http://iphex.pratt.duke.edu
And here: http://pmm.nasa.gov/IPHEx

Race Clark (CIMMS at NSSL) was awarded first place in the graduate student poster competition at the 38th Annual National Weather Association (NWA) meeting in Charleston, SC. Clark is a Ph.D. student in the OU School of Meteorology and works with advisors J.J. Gourley (NSSL) and Yang Hong (OU Civil and Environmental Engineering).

The award is selected by the NWA Weather Analysis and Forecasting Committee. The poster, A CONUS-wide analysis of flash flooding: simulations, warnings, and observations, identifies regional trends in the frequency of flash flood observations in NWS Storm Data, flash flood warnings, and flash flood guidance. His co-authors are J.J. Gourley (NOAA/OAR/NSSL), Yang Hong (OU), Zac Flamig (OU), and Ed Clark (NOAA/NWS). The recognition includes $125 and complimentary membership in the NWA for 2014.

NSSL’s Zachary Flamig has been awarded the prestigious 2013 Chateaubriand Fellowship. The merit-based grant is offered by the Embassy of France in the United States and aims to encourage collaborations, partnerships or joint projects between France and the U.S. Flamig is a Ph.D. student in the School of Meteorology at The University of Oklahoma and works at NSSL with advisor J.J. Gourley.

Flamig will conduct his fellowship at the University Joseph Fourier in Grenoble, France and will work with the Hydrometeorology, Climate and Impacts (HCMI) team at the Laboratoire d’etude des Transferts en hydrologie et Environnement (LTHE). His mission will be to explore a variety of hydrologic models with various physics representations, including the French Cevennes (CVN) distributed hydrologic model, to determine the surface runoff generation and routing mechanisms that are needed to yield accurate simulations of flash floods. Results from his research topic will be incorporated in the U.S. Flooded Locations and Simulated Hydrographs (FLASH) project at NSSL, which capitalizes on the high-resolution (1km/5min) radar-based inputs from the NMQ/Q2 system. The four-month fellowship begins in January, 2014.

NSSL collaborated with the French team during HyMeX (Fall 2012) and used the NOAA X-Pol mobile radar to complement the research radar network. NSSL/CIMMS previously hosted an LTHE graduate intern, Martin Calianno, and is presently hosting Prof. Celine Lutoff, a social scientist. Flamig’s fellowship will strengthen collaboration between the teams to advance the state-of-the-science of flash flood prediction and societal impacts.

A team from NSSL and HyDROS will partner with the NOAA Hydrometeorological Testbed at the Weather Prediction Center to host the FFaIR will explore using high-resolution atmospheric and hydrologic models to improve short-term forecasts of both precipitation amounts and flash flooding. The project runs from July 8-26, 2013.

NSSL’s Flooded Locations And Simulated Hydrographs (FLASH) system will be one of several modeling systems evaluated during FFaIR. The FLASH system uses radar-estimated rainfall from NSSL’s National Mosaic and QPE System (NMQ/Q2) as input into the CREST (Coupled Routing and Excess STorage) hydrologic model. FLASH then creates real-time 6-hour forecasts on a 1km grid that is updated every 15 minutes.

The 2013 FFaIR experiment will provide, for the first time, a pseudo-real time environment where participants from across the weather enterprise can explore the interface of meteorology and hydrology. Working together through the forecast process will foster collaboration between National Centers for Environmental Prediction, National Weather Service Forecast Offices, NOAA labs, and the academic community.

HyDROS Lab member Zac Flamig traveled to Edinburgh, Scotland for a workshop on cloud computing and big data as part of an Open Science Data Cloud (OSDC) Partnership for International Research and Education (PIRE) fellowship. The workshop was attended by undergraduate and graduate students from around the US and UK who are interested in using cloud computing technology to leverage big data for research. As part of the fellowship Mr. Flamig had previously traveled to Namibia to work with the Namibian Department of Hydrology on flood prediction and monitoring using the HyDROS lab’s CREST hydrologic model.

HyDROS students Jessica Erlingis and Jill Hardy participated in the Studies of Precipitation, flooding, and Rainfall Extremes Across Disciplines (SPREAD) workshop at Colorado State University from June 16-21. The workshop participants included 27 students and young professionals from fields ranging from economics and cognitive psychology to meteorology and hydrology. SPREAD students attended lectures from scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the National Science Foundation, the American Meteorological Society, the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, the National Weather Service, the city of Fort Collins, and HyDROS’s own Dr. JJ Gourley of the National Severe Storms Laboratory. The workshop also included a field trip to sites affected by the 1997 Fort Collins flood, the 1976 Big Thompson Canyon flood, and the 1982 dam break at Lawn Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park. Over the course of the year, the students will work on interdisciplinary projects related to multi-hazard events and assessing flood severity and will reconvene next year to present their findings.

The HyDROS Lab currently has two openings for graduate research assistants looking to do their MS/PhD at the University of Oklahoma. Both positions are part of NASA funded projects.

Graduate Research Assistant Position Opening on Severity Assessment of Extreme Rainfall and Flash Flooding

This NASA-funded project will consist in developing a retrieval database for a Bayesian inference of the severity assessment of storms potentially causing flash floods. It will benefit from an unprecedented, decade-long database of high-resolution rainfall estimates from NOAA/NSSL’s National Mosaic and Quantitative Precipitation Estimation (NMQ/Q2) system (http://nmq.ou.edu). The project will consider utilizing the database to assess the uncertainty of rainfall estimates, yielding probabilistic products. If the Bayesian method is proven to be successful for rainfall rates, then it will be extended to accommodate surface water flows simulated from a distributed hydrologic model. The selected student will join an enthusiastic team of about 30 people including several other students working on various hydrometeorology topics.
Link to PDF with full details

Graduate Research Assistant Position Opening on Satellite Remote Sensing of Precipitation

The NASA-funded project will utilize data from the NMQ/Q2 system to improve the monitoring of precipitation from space at a global scale. Specifically, the work will consist in performing detailed rainfall comparison analyses between ground-based radars and several space sensors for improved understanding and quantification of precipitation processes from space. Then, the project will take advantage of the newly upgraded dual-polarimetric radar observations from NEXRAD as well as GPM’s dual-frequency radar measurements from space. The combination of these unique measurements will provide new insights for hydrometeor types, particle size distributions, and cloud microphysical processes. The selected student will join an enthusiastic team of about 30 people including several other students working on various hydrometeorology topics.
Link to PDF with full details

HyDROS’s new book, “Multiscale Hydrologic Remote Sensing: Perspectives and Applications”, has been accepted as a textbook for upper level undergraduate or graduate courses on the subject of Remote Sensing Hydrology or Satellite Remote Sensing Applications. This book integrates advances in hydrologic science and innovative remote sensing technologies. Raising the visibility of interdisciplinary research on water resources, it explores hydrologic remote sensing at the local, urban, watershed and regional scales, as well as the continental and global scale.

HyDROS group has been transferring their high-resolution Coupled Routing and Excess STorage (CREST) hydrological model and the rainfall-triggered Landslide model to NASA’s SERVIR-Africa Mission and NOAA’s Flash Flood Headquarter Office for a Continental US-wide National-Flood-Landslide (NFL) project.