Leah finished her MS in Civil Engineering under Prof. Ben Livneh and Prof. Joe Kasprzyk in December of 2018. Her research includes the application of a hydrologic sediment ensemble model to reservoir sedimentation. Prior to attending University of Colorado, she received her BS in civil engineering at Santa Clara University where she was involved in ASCE and helped develop the engineering peer advising program. She now works as an Assistant Water Resources Engineer at Hazen and Sawyer in the San Francisco Bay Area.
CVEN-5363 Modeling of Hydrologic Systems
Introduces students to modeling techniques. Focus areas include physical hydrology and hydrometeorology; measurement and inference; climate change impacts; role of scale in hydrology; uncertainty analysis; and a case study project. Projects will examine hydrologic impacts of various drivers such as climate warming or land cover change, utilizing an assessment of historic conditions to better understand and model future disturbance scenarios.
Similar methodology to above, a data set of observed daily and monthly averaged precipitation, maximum and minimum temperature, gridded to a 1/16° (~6km) resolution spanning CONUS and the Canadian portion of the Columbia River Basin, with temporal coverage 1915-2011. The precipitation is adjusted for orographic effects using an elevation-aware*1961-1990 precipitation climatology.
A data set of observed daily and monthly averaged precipitation, maximum and minimum temperature, gridded to a 1/16° (~6km) resolution that spans the entire country of Mexico, the conterminous U.S. (CONUS), and regions of Canada south of 53º N for the period 1950-2013. The dataset improves previous products in spatial extent, orographic precipitation adjustment over Mexico and parts of Canada, and reduction of transboundary discontinuities. The precipitation is adjusted for orographic effects using an elevation-aware 1981-2010 precipitation climatology.
Fundamental Physics of Great Plains Drought
Extreme Streamflow Events in the Upper Missouri River Basin
Jenna received her M.S. degree in Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering in June of 2017--congratulations Jenna! Her M.S. thesis is titled "Multi-algorithm modeling of suspended sediment in steep mountain catchments". Her research focused on developing a physically based hydrologic model to simulate the effects of climate change and land-cover disturbance on water quality and flow rates. Jenna received her B.S. in Environmental Science from the University of Oregon in 2013.
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.