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CEE Seminar: Data, data everywhere.... Making sense of observations and models across scales

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Tuesday, February 13, 2018
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
Konstantinos Andreadis, Ph.D., Research Scientist, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA
CEE Spring 2018 Seminar Series

Quantifying water availability globally at scales that are relevant to decision makers but also can help us understand and resolve the dominant physical processes, require comprehensive observations and development of integrated models (statistical or physically-based). Although the number of traditional in-situ measurements has been declining globally, there has been an increase in the available data from alternative sensors (mostly from remote sensing) as well as output from water resources models. Nonetheless, the value of these data is hindered by a number of factors including the discrepancy in the spatial and temporal scales of the different datasets, the uncertainty in both the observation and models that the data are derived from, as well as computational aspects when performing analytics on them. In order to overcome some of these limitations, methods have been developed to merge observations and model predictions into optimal estimates. The merging of this information, termed data assimilation, has gained traction within hydrology in the past 10-15 years but results have shown that these methods are not a "black box" and require careful implementation to become useful. In this talk, I will present examples of fusing observations and models in hydrologic studies, and explore some of the limitations that need to be addressed within the context of integrated water resources science and applications......