UC Berkeley Water Research and Opportunities Portal

Analysis of steady and unsteady open-channel flow and application to rivers and streams. Examination of mixing and transport in rivers and streams. Effects of channel complexity. Floodplain dynamics and flow routing. Interaction of vegetation and fluid flows. Freshwater and tidal marshes. Sediment transport in rivers, streams, and wetlands. Implications for freshwater ecosystem function.

Hands-on design course in applied fluid mechanics, hydrology and water resources. Course goes beyond basic examples of fluid flow to develop environmental engineering solutions to real-world problems. A class team project is used to (1) explore the design process and project management; and (2) to integrate concepts from hydrology and fluid mechanics with structural, geotechnical and/or transportation engineering for a holistic design approach. Specific project topics vary with offering. Example topics include: engineering for air quality, design for sea-level rise mitigation, and development of alternative water supplies to address scarcity and post-disaster management.

Fluid mechanics of the natural water and air environment. Flux equation analyses; unsteady free surface flow; stratified flow; Navier-Stokes equations; boundary layers, jets and plumes; turbulence, Reynolds equations, turbulence modeling; mixing, diffusion, dispersion, and contaminant transport; geophysical flows in atmosphere and ocean; steady and unsteady flow in porous media. Application to environmentally sensitive flows in surface and groundwater and in lower atmosphere.

Application of fluid mechanics to transport and mixing in the environment. Fundamentals of turbulence, turbulent diffusion, and shear dispersion in steady and oscillatory flows and the effects of stratification. Application to rivers, wetlands, lakes, estuaries, the coastal ocean, and the lower atmosphere.

Hydrology is presented and analyzed in the context of a continuum extending from the atmosphere to the land surface to the subsurface to free water bodies. In this class, we develop the theoretical frameworks required to address problems that both lie within individual components and span these traditionally separate environments. Starting from a development of the fundamental dynamics of fluid motion, we examine applications within the subsurface, the atmosphere and surface water systems.

Course addresses topics of surface water hydrology, such as processes of water in the atmosphere, over land surface, and within soil; advanced representation and models for infiltration and evapotranspiration processes; partition of water and energy budgets at the land surface; snow and snowmelt processes; applications of remote sensing; flood and drought, and issues related to advanced hydrological modeling. Students will address practical problems and will learn how to use the current operational hydrologic forecasting model, and build hydrological models.

A quantitative introduction to the hydrology of the terrestrial environment including lower atmosphere, watersheds, lakes, and streams. All aspects of the hydrologic cycle, including precipitation, infiltration, evapotranspiration, overland flow, streamflow, and groundwater flow. Chemistry and dating of groundwater and surface water. Development of quantitative insights through problem solving and use of simple models. This course requires one field experiment and several group computer lab assignments.

Current problems in fluid flow, heat flow, and solute transport in the earth. Pressure- and thermal-driven flow, instability, convection, interaction between fluid flow and chemical reactions. Pore pressure; faulting and earthquakes; diagenesis; hydrocarbon migration and trapping; flow-associated mineralization; contaminant problems.

Introduction to marine geochemistry: the global water cycle; processes governing the distribution of chemical species within the hydrosphere; ocean circulation; chemical mass balances, fluxes, and reactions in the marine environment from global to submicron scales; carbon system equilibrium chemistry and biogeochemistry of fresh and salt walter; applications of natural and anthropogenic stable and radioactive tracers; internal ocean processes.

A review of the mechanics of glacial systems, including formation of ice masses, glacial flow mechanisms, subglacial hydrology, temperature and heat transport, global flow, and response of ice sheets and glaciers. We will use this knowledge to examine glaciers as geomorphologic agents and as participants in climate change.

The tectonics and morphology of the sea floor, the geologic processes in the deep and shelf seas, and the climatic record contained in deep-sea sediments. The course will cover sources and composition of marine sediments, sea-level change, ocean circulation, paleoenvironmental reconstruction using fossils, imprint of climatic zonation on marine sediments, marine stratigraphy, and ocean floor resources.

This course is intended to provide students with an overview of current thinking about cities and their components (buildings, parks, streets) as ecological and cultural systems. It will provide an introduction to methods for investigating the dynamics of flows and relationships in the built environment and students will gain experience constructing their own narratives as ways of asking and answering questions about human habitat that could shape the future.

ntroduction to fish ecology, with particular emphasis on the identification and ecology of California’s inland fishes. This course will expose students to the diversity of fishes found in California, emphasizing the physical (e.g., temperature, flow), biotic (e.g., predation, competition), and human-related (e.g., dams, fisheries) factors that affect the distribution, diversity, and abundance of these fishes.

This course introduces the fundamental physical principles that are necessary to understand the distribution and dynamics of water near the Earth’s surface. A quantitative approach will provide mathematical descriptions of hydrolgical phenomena that will be used for a variety of hydrological applications to river flow hydraulics, flood frequency analysis, ecapotranspirtation from terrestrial ecosystems, groundwater flow, and ecohydrological dynamics. This course will provide an introduction to hydrological processes and data analysis. The purpose of the laboratory is to illustrate in an experimental setting the principles and applications introdcuted in lecture.

A quantitative introduction to the hydrology of the terrestrial environment including lower atmosphere, watersheds, lakes, and streams. All aspects of the hydrologic cycle, including precipitation, infiltration, evapotranspiration, overland flow, streamflow, and groundwater flow. Chemistry and dating of groundwater and surface water. Development of quantitative insights through problem solving and use of simple models. This course requires one field experiment and several group computer lab assignments.

This course focuses on a survey of physiological approaches to understanding plant-environment interactions from the functional perspective. Lectures cover physiological adaptation; limiting factors; resources acquisition/allocation; photosynthesis, carbon, energy balance; water use and relations; nutrient relations; linking physiology; stable isotope applications in ecophysiology; stress physiology; life history and physiology; evolution of physiological performance; physiology population, community, and ecosystem levels.

This course examines high-Reynolds number flows, including their stability, their waves, and the influence of rotating and stratification as applied to geophysical and astrophysical fluid dynamics as well as to engineering flows. Examples of problems studies include vortex dynamics in planetary atmospheres and protoplanetary disks, jet streams, and waves (Rossby, Poincare, inertial, internal gravity, and Kelvin) in the ocean and atmosphere.

Fluid dynamics and heat transfer; thermal and hydraulic analysis of nuclear reactors; two-phase flow and boiling; compressible flow; stress analysis; energy conversion methods.

Sally Thompson focuses on ecohydrology, surface hydrology, and nonlinear dynamics.

Her projects include:
1) Eel River Critical Zone Observatory
2) Effects of reversing fire suppression on Sierra Nevada hydrology – Illilouette Creek Basin
3) Unmanned Aerial Systems for Water Observations
4) Reconstructing 50 years of human-induced hydrologic change in the Arkavathy Basin, Karnataka, India
5) Exploring land use impacts on hydrology in the Cerrado-Amazon transition zone, Brazil

Inez Fung focuses on climate change and atmospheric science with particular attention towards geophysical fluid dynamics and large-scale numerical modeling, remote sensing of earth systems, atmosphere-ocean interactions, and atmosphere-biosphere interactions. Additionally, she is the co-director of the Berkeley Institute of the Environment.

Her current projects center around:
1) Changes in East Asian monsoon precipitation
2) Subsurface water dynamics and tree resilience/mortality to droughts

Bill Dietrich’s research focuses on the processes that underlie the evolution of landscapes. His research group and collaborators are developing geomorphic transport laws for soil production, weathering and transport, and river and debris flow incision into bedrock. They are exploring the processes that control the sorting of sediment on river beds, the transport of sediment in steep, coarse bedded channels, the routing of sediment through river networks, the influence of sediment supply on river morphodynamics, the entrainment of sediment to form debris flows, and the dispersion and deposition of sediment across floodplains.

Maggi Kelly’s lab group’s motto is “mapping for a changing California”, and they use a range of geospatial data and analytics – from spatial modeling, remote sensing, drones, lidar, historical archives, surveys, participatory mapping, and the field – to gain insights about how and why California landscapes are changing, and what that change means for those who live on, use, and manage our lands.

My research efforts emphasize environmental change of polar regions, with a focus on glaciologic problems. The choice of polar glaciology reflects the unique and powerful contributions that this subdiscipline makes to environmental change research. Ice core reconstructions of environmental history offer the most comprehensive, varied, and high-resolution view yet achieved of past environments. The ice sheets themselves are a major control on global sea level and albedo, and on high-latitude atmospheric and oceanic circulations, and on physical landscape characteristics. No other topographic features of this size and importance are changeable on such short time scales.

I use a quantitatively rigorous and novel blend of geophysical and geochemical techniques to address questions that are important in this context: How have climatic temperature and atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations covaried in the past? What is the tempo and magnitude of climate changes in polar regions? What determines the isotopic composition of precipitation? How have the great ice sheets changed in the past, and how will they change in the future? How do they flow? How are microphysical processes in ice manifest at the scale of whole glaciers and ice sheets?

The Bay Area Water Quality Fellowship is open to graduate students whose studies are related specifically to water quality issues that affect the San Francisco Bay. It is intended to support scientific research in the following topics:
-the exposure or effect, if any, of organisms within the San Francisco Bay estuary to selenium, metals, and/or organic chemicals through food chain transfer
-the degree, if any, to which sediments are a source of exposure for organisms within the San Francisco Bay estuary to selenium, metals, and/or organic chemicals
-other research that involves the effect of pollution on the San Francisco Bay estuary and/or its ecosystem.

Applications are due at the beginning of Spring semester. Recipients will receive $15,000 for the following Fall semester. The award can be used as a payment for registration fees and/or stipend.