CE Seminar: Rivers in Human-Nature Dialogue: An Earth System Modeling Approach

Abstract: Rivers are vitally bridging the interactions between human and nature on the one hand. On the other hand, rivers are an essential linkage in the regional and global atmosphere-land-ocean cycles of water, energy and biogeochemistry. However, there is a lack or under representation of rivers within most of the earth system models (formerly known as climate models) including the extensively used Community Earth System Model (CESM). This talk presents the research activities at PNNL centering on the understanding and representing riverine dynamics of water, energy and biogeochemistry at the regional and global scales. In particular, the focus will be on a physically based riverine modeling framework which is now embedded within CESM and coupled to a water management module. The insights distilled from the model results will be discussed, followed by the limitations and future directions of this modeling endeavor.

Speaker: Hong-Yi Li earned his PhD from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Master and Bachelor’ degrees both from Tsinghua University, China. He joined the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in 2010 as a postdoctoral researcher and is now a research scientist. Trained as a watershed hydrologist, His current research focus is to improve the representation of hydrologic processes in Earth system models from three major aspects: 1) Improving diagnosis of earth system modeling behavior by systematically introducing meaningful signatures revealed from watershed hydrology; 2) Improving parameterization of key hydrologic processes in earth system modeling, 3) Adding/enhancing the representation of human systems in earth system modeling. As such he still maintains his interest in watershed hydrology, but mainly from the aspect of bridging watershed hydrology and earth system modeling. Another current research focus is to decipher the behavior and functions of aquatic biogeochemical systems under climate and human-induced changes primarily within the earth system modeling framework.

Speaker: Dr. Hong-Yi Li, PNNL