News

Researcher John Malito presented work at the annual European Geophysical Union conference in Vienna, Austria. Presentations were titled ,"Addressing Water Scarcity in Texas: Evaluating Stormwater Quality and Quantity for Managed Aquifer Recharge" and "Unforeseen geomorphic consequences of modifying coastal river systems". Pictured is a clever urban stormwater management system in the western portion of the city, where a concrete stream and flood barrier lie next to the metro.

The Texas Water Journal has just published a new article by Justin Thompson and Michael Young, "A Hydro-Economic Approach for Quantifying Well Performance Thresholds and Recoverable Groundwater Yields in Texas". You can read it here 

John Malito has just begun work on a new project in collaboration with the UTexas Marine Science Institute, titled "Assessing Climatic Impacts on Wetland Transformation and Resilience along the Texas Coast using Remotely Sensed Imagery".  

This study aims to evaluate the transformation of wetlands in the Texas Coastal Bend Region over the last several decades in response to macroclimatic stressors with remote sensing data hosted by GEE. We propose to harmonize historical Landsat and Sentinel reflectance datasets (1985 – 2023) and conduct a pilot study to identify wetland areas most vulnerable to climate-driven stress. 

By identifying wetlands that may be vulnerable to sea level rise (i.e., those shown to be drowning) and/or macroclimatic stressors (by experiencing prolonged impacts, delayed recovery, and stacked events) this study can help guide targeted restoration and conservation efforts. Furthermore, this study represents a critical first step in utilizing the advantages of GEE for ecological analyses at such large scales, setting a foundation for these techniques to be applied to study areas throughout Texas and beyond. 

Congratulations to HARG scientists Wonhyun Lee, Alex Sun, Bridget Scanlon, and UT-Austin collaborator Clint Dawson on their newest publication! This publication is titled, "Hindcasting compound pluvial, fluvial and coastal flooding during Hurricane Harvey (2017) using Delft3D-FM". 

In this study they quantified the impacts of different compound flood components for Hurricane Harvey (pluvial, fluvial, and storm surge). Results showed that Nonlinear effects of compound flooding are greater than the sum of individual components. 

Find it here!

The group was well represented at this years American Geophysical Union meeting that took place in San Francisco this December. Some of the topics included aquifer storage and recovery (Malito), machine learning for flood forecasting (Sun), coastal flood modeling (Lee), satellite data for flood forecasting (Rateb), and remote sensing of water storage (Scanlon).