Scientific Focus Area
Ecologist Heidi Steltzer evaluates the site of a 2018 wildfire within 10 miles of her Colorado home. Changes in snow affect the disturbance regime of U.S. mountain regions. (Credit: Joel Dyar)
Heidi Steltzer drew upon experience working in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado near the headwaters of the Colorado River in co-authoring the report’s chapter on high mountains. This marks the first time since 1996 that the IPCC has featured a chapter on mountains within one of its reports. Read more »
USGS researchers working at East River and the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory have partnered with EMusic to create music using subsurface ElectroMagnetic (EM) data collected by USGS from Crested Butte.
The sound installation, titled “Colorado Sketches: A musical day trip into the Mountains” will take place on September 29 from 1 pm to 7 pm Mountain Daylight Time (UTC -0600) via live stream. More info is provided in the teaser video below:
Carl Steefel, a senior scientist in the Earth & Environmental Sciences Area at Berkeley Lab and a component lead of the Watershed Function SFA, has been named by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) as a 2019 AGU Fellow.
Every year, the AGU Fellows program recognizes members who have made exceptional contributions to the Earth and Space sciences. Vetted by a committee of AGU Fellows, honorees represent no more than 0.1 percent of AGU’s 60,000 members. Read more »
Reed Maxwell, Rowlinson Professor of Hydrology at Colorado School of Mines and a component lead of the Watershed Function SFA, has been named by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) as a 2019 AGU Fellow.
Every year, the AGU Fellows program recognizes members who have made exceptional contributions to the Earth and Space sciences. Vetted by a committee of AGU Fellows, honorees represent no more than 0.1 percent of AGU’s 60,000 members. Read more »
The ExaSheds project is the first-ever systematic effort to advance powerful machine learning and Exascale computing to transform our ability to predict watershed behavior and increase the use of ever-larger and more-complex data obtained from watershed field observations.
Susan Hubbard – Associate Lab Director Earth and Environmental Sciences Area
Susan Hubbard, Associate Laboratory Director of the Berkeley Lab Earth & Environmental Sciences Area and lead for the Watershed Function SFA, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a 239-year old honorary society that recognizes accomplished scholars, scientists and artists in academia, the humanities, arts, business, and government. She is one of four Berkeley Lab scientists elected to the prestigious Academy this year. Read more »
Susan Hubbard, Associate Laboratory Director for the Earth and Environmental Sciences Area, will be inducted into the Alameda County Women’s Hall of Fame, at an annual awards ceremony on March 30. Hubbard is being honored for her scientific contributions to key environmental challenges of our time, including the use of geophysical methods to quantify how watersheds and ecosystems are responding to changing conditions, and implications for water and biogeochemical cycles.
Susan Hubbard joins 13 other local women who represent the region’s rich diversity and a remarkable range of achievements made working to address issues such as environmental sustainability; and racial, income, and healthcare inequality; and to strengthen access to arts education and athletics programs for girls and young women.
Bhavna Arora (right) and former intern Madison Burrus discuss the computer simulations they are creating using data about river discharge, precipitation, and snowpack collected from the East River catchment site near Crested Butte, CO. (Credit: Marilyn Chung/Berkeley Lab)
SFA researcher Bhavna Arora was interviewed on Water Deeply regarding how declining snowpack is altering water quality in the Colorado River.
A more comprehensive interview and story were conducted by the Berkley Lab News Center, where Bhavna explains how drought and other extremes impact water pollution. Read more »
An overview of the Watershed function SFA and the associated East River Watershed was published in in the Vadose Zone Journal “Special Section: Hydrological Observatories”. The paper describes several recently developed approaches to interrogate, monitor and simulate transient watershed partitioning and biogeochemical responses – from genome to watershed spatial scales and from episodic to decadal timescales.
The workshop began with a guided tour of the East River watershed.
Attendees pose briefly for a group photo.
Attendees included microbial and plant ecologists, hydrologists, geochemists, geologists, geophysicists, remote and snow sensing experts, data and computational scientists and resource managers. Read more »
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