Rivers are foundational to human
civilization. They define our national borders, enable
navigation, and provide drinking water, irrigation water,
hydroelectric power, recreation, water supplies for
traditional and high-tech manufacturing, and homes for
ecosystems. Conversely, floods are devastating; droughts can
be even worse. And with growing demands made on our rivers by
expanding populations, and more uncertain water supplies under
looming climate changes, understanding how rivers work and
predicting what they'll do next is more crucial than ever. In
this talk, we'll start by exploring some general questions
about how watersheds work, like how the world's water is
connected in a tremendous global cycle, why a river can flood
one year and dry up the next, and what urbanization does to
rivers. Then we'll chat about river prediction, focusing on
river flow forecasting over timeframes ranging from hours to
decades. We'll look at examples of how different computational
approaches are being used to make those projections, from
virtual rivers rendered in silicon (process-based simulation
models) to cyborg hydrologists (artificial intelligence), and
what types of information these models need to work, like
field scientists dropped off by helicopter on remote
mountaintops to collect data and satellite imaging of
watersheds from space.
About the Speaker:
Dr. Fleming is the Technical Lead for
Applied R&D at the US Department of Agriculture's National
Water and Climate Center in Portland, Oregon. He has affiliate
faculty postings at Oregon State University and the University
of British Columbia, and prior affiliations include, among
others, the Meteorological Service of Canada, BC Hydro, and
Los Alamos National Laboratory. Sean has over two decades of
public, private, and nonprofit-sector experience in technical,
field, and managerial roles across several countries. His
degrees are in geophysics, geology, and civil engineering,
with expertise in machine learning, nonlinear dynamics,
hydrology, glaciology, and climate science. Sean's work
focuses on bridging gaps between theory and practice. He is
also actively engaged in science outreach, including a
popular-science book published by Princeton University Press,
essays in Scientific American and Wired, and public talks at
the Smithsonian and elsewhere.