Deciphering the combined effects of artificial and natural water storage structures on late-season flows
Natural water storage has been proposed and currently under implementation as a solution to mitigate the water stress caused by droughts. However, it remains a challenge how to scale-up these natural storage innovations and their impacts from the current pilot projects to the basin scale while accounting for the effects of artificial reservoirs. The goal of this study is to develop a basin-scale hydrological modeling framework to integrate the hydrological effects of the natural storage, groundwater storage, channel storage and reservoirs, and more importantly, their interactions. Research is being conducted in collaboration with the Montana Freshwater Program at the Nature Conservancy.
Dr. HongYi Li has been a tenure-track Associate Professor in the Department of Land Resources and Environmental Sciences at Montana State University. He is now an affiliated faculty at Montana State University and Associate Professor at the University of Houston. Li’s specific interests include developing novel modeling and data analysis tools to understand lateral transport of water, energy and biogeochemistry fluxes across land surface and through river systems under climate and human-induced changes, and pursuing the understanding and representing of two-way interactions and feedbacks between Human and Earth Systems within the climate-water-energy-environment nexus.