Modeling Hydrogeologic Fluxes and Their Impact on Natural and Human Systems

Climate change, population growth and land use change are increasing the scarcity of surface water supplies and driving greater demand for groundwater resources. This trend has led to the ongoing depletion of many of the world’s aquifers. While many have observed regional groundwater depletion, the processes driving this depletion, and its effect on aquifer dynamics, are poorly understood. One major barrier to improving understanding of these processes is a lack of data at appropriate resolution and scale. The booming satellite industry is providing petabytes of earth observational data that have the potential to answer many of these scale- and resolution- dependent questions, but relating these disparate datasets to hydrogeologic systems requires an improved fundamental understanding of the system properties linking aquifer processes to land surface dynamics. For example, Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) can be used to estimate earth deformation with cm- to mm- accuracy, but the mechanisms linking aquifer dynamics to ground deformation are complex, non-linear and vary with time. Evapotranspirative flux, a major component of groundwater use, can be modeled with thermal satellite imagery, but these models alone do not adequately explain groundwater demand, indicating complex inter-relationships between evapotranspiration, precipitation, groundwater use and surface water use. In this talk, I will discuss several ongoing projects that seek to address these challenges, including both process-based and data-driven models that integrate in-situ and satellite datasets to identify key, scale-dependent drivers of groundwater flux, explore how temporally varying hydrologic parameters can alter aquifer dynamics, and link groundwater over-use to impacts on water quality and plant water stress.

Speaker Bio

Dr. Ryan Smith is an Assistant Professor in the Geological Engineering program at Missouri University of Science and Technology, which he joined in Fall 2018. He earned his Ph.D. at Stanford University in Geophysics in 2018, and his B.S. in Geology at Brigham Young University, Utah in 2014. Dr. Smith is a remote sensing hydrologist. He studies groundwater resources and quality at regional and local scales by combining satellite, airborne and ground-based geophysical, and in-situ datasets, using both process-based models and machine learning techniques. Dr. Smith’s research is funded by NASA, NGA, USGS, and NSF. He was awarded the NGA New Investigator Proposal in 2020, the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship as a PhD student in 2015, and the Outstanding Thesis Award from the Geophysics Department at Stanford University in 2019. Dr. Smith serves as an Associate Editor for Hydrogeology Journal, and as a Guest Editor for Remote Sensing in Earth Systems Sciences.

Read more about Ryan Smith's research here.

Host: Jeff Catalano

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