My project focuses on a single hydrology course that I teach every year. I’ve already incorporated climate science into the course in that we explore how changing climate trends produce different precipitation patterns and necessitate different infrastructure, but now also want to tie in climate justice as we explore how changes in climate impact specific neighborhoods in different ways. My goal is for students to center themselves (and people in general) in the study of hydrology.
CIVE 430 is a hydrology course required of all students in Civil and Environmental Engineering. It is taught in both fall and spring terms and typically has an enrollment of 30-40 students. I have taught this course on and off for the past 18 years. The course provides an overview of hydrologic processes, both in natural systems and in the built environment, with a focus on preparing students to quantify these processes using quantitative methods and analytical tools. In that sense we talk a lot about how urbanization and development impact the hydrologic cycle.
What we don’t do is incorporate the human experience, both as contributors to and inhabitants of the built environment. My primary goal with this project is to bring the human experience into our study of hydrology.
When I first began teaching the course, the objectives were entirely technical:
To solve a water balance using basic processes of the hydrologic cycle (precipitation, interception, depression storage, evaporation, transpiration, infiltration, runoff, streamflow, and groundwater flow)
To use precipitation data appropriately in solving water resource problems
To quantify hydrologic processes across different land use types and landscape surfaces
To learn how to generate and analyze hydrographs
To think critically about and respond to current issues and problems in hydrology
To satisfy the objective “To think critically about and respong to current issues and problems in hydrology”, I would often assign newspaper readings on curent events – often climate- or development- related – and we would discuss them as a class, but it was outside of the technical scope. For example, all of our regulations for stormwater management and the magnitude of the storms we use to design infrastructure are based on historical data. So while we would talk about changes, we would still use historical data for our designs. I would ask students to think about weather events in their own histories and we would use data from those events in homework assignments and in-class problems.
Beyond that, we spent very little time exploring the impacts of climate change on hydrology and water resource management, and even less time connecting to their own personal experiences.
In recent years, as climate models grew more sophisticated, and more importantly, as we gained the ability to downscale their outputs to predict city-level temperature and precipitation patterns, I introduced a major project into the course in which students compare stormwater runoff from historical storms to runoff from storms that are predicted to occur in the future. The project unfolds over the last half of the course, and a good deal of class-time is devoted to project work since many of the analyses are unfamiliar to the students.
Project objectives include:
For this part of the project, you will identify and characterize a small parcel of land within a larger watershed. You will need to answer the question of how much water to manage (volume) and at what peak flow rate (peak flow) for existing conditions and modified conditions that you will propose for 24-hr design storms with 1yr, 5yr, 10yr and 100yr return periods.
For this part of the project, you will use observed and predicted precipitation statistics for Philadelphia to evaluate changes in the number of wet days per year historically and for the projected time period of 2051-2080 and the change in magnitude of the precipitation.
For this part of the project, you will refer back to the site you selected in Part 1, and the analysis you completed on a stormwater implementation to decrease runoff from identified 24-hour design storms. Now you are asked to consider the performance of your implementation over the next 70 years. How will you analyze its performance in managing stormwater in the face of a changing climate? Predictions of daily precipitation for Philadelphia through 2100 are available under two different climate change scenarios (SSP245 and SSP585). Using this data, develop a plan for how you will evaluate future precipitation patterns, design storms, and/or stormwater management. From this plan, select two specific analyses that you will do to help inform your assessment.
My goal for this project is to center CIVE 430: Hydrology (a required technical course for all civil and environmental engineering students) on the human experience. I will begin in the Fall 2024 offering of the course, but expect it may take an offering or two to get it right. I will introduce many of pedagogical activities we used in our incubator into the classroom, including:
Climate emotion wheel
Reflective writing on how/if they see themselves with respect to the course material
Class spectrum on climate anxiety
Using nature-based observations to introduce technical content
I will also reframe the class project by incorporating the on-the-ground experience of weather events into the project analysis. For example, whereas we previously analyzed storms by calculating runoff and flooding and then designed infrastructure to manage the water, we will now also compare how flooding from a single event is experienced differently in individual households and neighborhoods, consider response and damages to people living in those homes, research how the city responds and provides recovery assistance, and then reevaluate engineering measures to manage stormwater.
Rather than waiting until the last half of the course to introduce a project, students choose different neighborhoods across Philadelphia at the beginning of the term. I will revise this project statement as I further develop the course, but a draft may include the following:
For this assignment you are asked to document the local impacts of Philadelphia’s climate for representative housing units throughout the city, making note of how storms, weather patterns, significant legislation (federal and local) and/or infrastructure projects are experienced by and impact each location. To help frame your analysis, consider the following outline:
Select a representative housing unit within a specific neighborhood in Philadelphia (Eastwick, Center City, East Falls and Hunting Park etc). Make note of relevant features in each location, including elevation, stormwater infrastructure (green infrastructure and sewershed), housing stock and likelihood of home heating/air conditioning, location in the floodplain, tree cover, distance to cooling center etc.)
Identify and summarize relevant data sources for your study.
What high-resolution tools and databases are available for mapping temperatures, precipitation and flooding at the neighborhood level in Philadelphia?
Compare these to standard National Weather Service/NOAA records for Philadelphia/Mt Holly.
What methods are available in the technical literature for filling in missing data and/or extrapolating spatial and/or temporal trends?
As we proceed through the course, we will select specific storms and weather events in Philadelphia’s history, compare their effects of different areas of the city, and document the experience of people living in each of those areas (which parts of the city flooded for different storms? Whose homes/businesses were damaged? Who had to relocate?). As students gain the skills they need to conduct different levels of hydrologic analyses, we will note how conditions differ across the city. My plan is for groups of students to represent residents of different parts of the city.
I decided to keep this to a single required course because I know it will continue to be offered over the next few years (and that it will take me several course offerings to iterate this project) and that I will always be able to teach it. My longer-term goal is to thread a justice-centered approach throughout the water curriculum, in collaboration with other faculty in my department. We have decided to meet as a group starting in the fall to coordinate our efforts so that climate science and climate justice can inform the water resources engineering tracks within our department.