HYDROLOGIC/HYDRAULIC MODELING
PROJECT // SACRAMENTO RIVER
This project was sponsored by NASA Applied Sciences Grant during Jason's Ph.D. program at the University of Colorado at Boulder. An Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) project, the goal of the study aimed to meet multi-objective optimization criteria by simulating optimal operations at Shasta Dam using the Temperature Control Devices to release appropriate temperature-regulated flow downstream to support salmon fishery recovery after multi-year drought. In addition, the operations could not impact (and should even support water supply planning) by maintaining sufficient water for agricultural interests and public drinking water. Salt water intrusion must be kept oceanward and at the same time, in-reservoir ecological markers were not impacted - nor was flood risk increased. It is perhaps the most complex system anyone at Weather & Water has worked on! '
The project involved data collection and QA/QC; stochastic weather generation to simulate future weather and seasonal climate; advanced statistical methods (i.e., GLM) for statistical water temperature prediction - along with coupling hundred of thousands of scenarios within the CE-QUAL-W2 model developed by Jason and fully-dynamic RAFT model developed NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Service. This architecture serves as the impetus for the development of the DAART and CRAFTEA infrastructures at Weather & Water.
PROJECT // IHABBS
In the western United States, snowmelt runoff is key in hydrologic forecasting, as a subconsultant to RTI and then employee at MetStat, Dr. Caldwell served as the technical lead for acquiring, processing, and generating snow water equivalent time series from the Snow Data Assimilation System (SNODAS) available from NOAA and NSIDC. These massive gridded datasets were processed from gridded (i.e., GRIB-2, netCDF, etc.) formats into suitable data series at the watershed scale using GIS tools co-developed with RTI staff.
The purpose of these data were to support the IHABBS and CAP programs used by the California-Nevada River Forecast Center to generate basin-delineation and collect/output critical time series and climatological information for use in model calibration, validation, and operational forecasting using the SACSMA model within the CHPS-FEWS architectures at the National Weather Service.