Members

Ben Livneh
Assistant Professor

The primary research interests of my research group is in quantifying the hydrologic impacts of both climate change and land cover disturbance processes across multiple scales. The scientific community’s understanding of climate change continues to evolve, and so we need a flexible framework—models, observations, and communication—to evolve together with this understanding. The tools we use in my research group to address these challenges involve integrating observations with modeling and statistics, to attribute causes and improve process understanding.

Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering
Ph.D., University of Washington, 2012
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Carli is pursuing a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder. Carli’s current research addresses the broad challenge of quantifying the impacts of wildfires on hydrologic responses in watersheds in the west. She is assisting in the design and creation of a laboratory wildfire and rainfall simulator, leading a field campaign and modeling effort to resolve the importance of terrain slope, rainfall intensity, and burn severity on runoff and sediment loading. The outputs from the laboratory effort will be used to constrain watershed-scale simulations across the west. Carli completed her BS in mechanical engineering in 2018 from the University of Iowa.

Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering

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Nels Bjarke completed his B.S. in Earth and Planetary Science in 2014 and M.S. of Earth and Planetary Science in 2019. Nels's previous research focused on climate variability and the impact of warming regional temperatures in the southwestern US on the relationship between snow-pack and subsequent runoff season streamflow. Currently, Nels is pursuing his Ph.D. in the Civil Engineering department at CU Boulder. Nels' current research focuses on evaluating the historical and future water-energy balance across the western US using historical meteorological datasets, hydrologic models, and projected global climate model simulations from CMIP6 to constrain uncertainty in the future of surface water availability. 



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Fangfang Yao
Post-doctoral Fellow

Fangfang is a postdoctoral fellow in Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES). He holds a Ph.D. in Physical Geography from Kansas State University and an M.S. in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) from the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.  His research explores the interaction among lakes, climate change and human activities with a primary focus on the terrestrial water cycle, climate and human impacts on natural and manmade lakes, and the environmental impact of dams. Currently, he is combining three decades of high-resolution satellite observations, climate, and hydrologic models, to quantify and attribute lake water storage trends across the globe.

Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences
Ph.D. in Geography
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Parth Modi completed his M.S. in Biological Systems Engineering from Virginia Tech in 2020 and is currently a Doctoral Research Assistant in the Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering department at the University of Colorado Boulder. He has several experiences in land surface modeling (VIC, Noah-MP, National Water Model) and has worked on projects understanding the impacts of climate change on mesoscale hydrological processes and risk assessment of natural hazards including droughts and floods. Currently, his research projects are focused on identifying alternatives to snow-based streamflow predictions particularly during the drought, and understanding how coupled natural and human systems affect regional water economies/trade.

Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering

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Justin Pflug
Post-doctoral Fellow

Justin is a visiting postdoctoral fellow at CIRES, working with Dr. Ben Livneh and Dr. Jennifer Balch. Justin received his Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Washington in 2021, where his research focused on snow model development and meteorological downscaling strategies for snow simulations in mountainous terrain. Justin is continuing this work with the Water and Climate Research Group, specifically investigating how information from remotely-sensed snowpack in historic periods can be used to improve future projections of mountain snow. Justin is using these projections in support of future climate assessments, water supply forecasting, and assessments of wildlife habitat for snow-adapted species like Wolverines.

Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences
Ph.D.
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