Abstract

Water prediction at the temporal and spatial scales to make decisions that matter for resilience and prosperity of human and natural systems remains a quintessential civil and environmental engineering quest in the 21st century. For those of us among the early generation of scientists and engineers who benefitted from NASA’s Mission to Planet Earth vision in the last quarter of the 20th century, the advent of ever-higher performance computing and Big Data, and met with the inevitability of interdisciplinary science, it’s been the most challenging and yet optimistic of times. Over the last two decades, my research group operated monitoring networks and conducted long-term water-cycle studies in mountainous regions high and small, including some of the most biodiverse hotspots in the world, that provide water resources to nearly two billion people and counting. In this presentation, I will focus on selected research findings from our work in the Himalayas, the Andes, and the Appalachian Mountains that reveal the complex multi-scale multi-physics interactions at the interface of Ecology, Atmospheric and Hydrologic Sciences with implications for re-thinking engineering frameworks to address global water security and climate adaptation problems.

Biography

Dr. Ana P. Barros is the Donald Biggar Willett Chair of Engineering and Department Head of Civil and Environmental Engineering in The Grainger College of Engineering at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her primary research interests are in hydrology, hydrometeorology and environmental physics, with a focus on water-cycle processes in regions of complex terrain, remote sensing of the environment, and predictability and risk assessment of extreme events. Professor Barros has served in multiple national committees over the years, including the Space Studies Board of the National Research Council, Water Science and Technology Board, Board of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate, and the US National Committee for the International Hydrology Program (IHP) of UNESCO. She was a Senior Fellow at the Energy and Climate Partnership of the Americas (ECPA) 2011–2015, and a founding member of the ASCE committee on Climate Change and Adaptation. Currently, Dr. Barros is the Past-Chair of Atmospheric and Hydrospheric Sciences at AAAS, and President-Elect of the Hydrology Section of AGU. She was the Chief Editor of the Journal of Hydrometeorology for five years, and a member of the Editorial Board of AGU Advances. Professor Barros is a Fellow of AGU, AMS, ASCE, and AAAS; and a senior member of IEEE and member of the National Academy of Engineering.

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