Research Experience for Undergraduates Leads Into Semester-Long Project

Sometimes, one positive experience is all it takes to decide on a future career path. For three students, the Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) at the University of Wyoming (UWY) was that experience.

The CI-WATER program, which ran through July and August, enticed Noll Roberts, a senior at UW, to contemplate a change of major. “My major is Molecular Biology, but now I’m switching to Mathematics,” he says.

This year’s REU focused on computer modeling, coding and hydrology.  For a month, Noll, Jingyu Li and Troy Axthelm collaborated on various aspects of modeling.

“Jingyu and I have been working on a project that’s been modeling the shade on a certain land plot,” says Troy, a senior at UW.

For Jingyu Li, a Laramie High School senior, the REU has given her a lot to think about.  “I’m not entirely sure what I want to do yet, but probably computer science and math,” she says.

Along with developing their coding and mathematical skills, the REU taught the importance of strong communication skills.

“I liked learning about how to interact with people in other departments," says Noll. "I think this REU was really good for that.”

While the REU has come the end, their work has not. Over the course of the next semester, Noll, Troy and Jingyu will receive upper division credit to continue their projects.

“We’re going to keep working on it so that it can work with the high performance computer and be efficient,” says Troy.

 

By Robin E. Rasmussen

Collaboration and the CI-WATER Hydrologic Modeling Workshop

In science, collaboration takes a variety of forms through partnerships, information sharing and cooperative projects. The CI-WATER Hydrologic Modeling Workshop, held July 22-26 at the University of Wyoming (UW), tapped into all of these forms of collaboration, through the building of new partnerships, the utilization of collaboratively created modeling systems, and the application of new information into group projects.

“We had five students from JSU, one from Utah State University and three from here, at UW,” says Dr. Fred Ogden, the lead principal investigator for UW on the CI-WATER project, who facilitated the workshop.

CI-WATER is a collaborative grant between UW, Utah StateUniversity (USU), Brigham Young University (BYU) and University of Utah (UU). During the workshop, partnerships and friendship between the universities began to develop as participants learned how to use spatial hydrologic tools.

“The CI-WATER high performance computer model is still under development, so we decided to use GSSHA, which is the model I helped develop with the Army Corps of Engineers based in Vicksburg, Mississippi,” Dr. Ogden says.

GSSHA, the Gridded Surface Subsurface Hydrologic Analysis Model, is similar to the model CI-WATER is developing. Spatial hydrologic tools, like the GSSHA model, can be used to mitigate flooding and understand the impacts of changes in land use.

“We’re teaching them how to run a state of the art hydrologic model,” says Dr. Ogden.

Participants started out learning the model in small group projects.

“We started out with a little watershed,” says Sam Rhoads, a civil engineering major from JSU. “Then we added in residential land-use, industrial land-use and learned how to add different hydrologic structures so we could get a feel for everything to do with the model.”

After learning the basics of the tool, Dr. Ogden decided to introduce a bit of what he calls ‘reality’ to their projects by taking them out of the computer lab and into the field to use a rainfall simulator.

“Basically it can simulate rainfall on a plot of land,” says Sam. “From that, you can measure a lot more accurately than just taking numbers from a table. You can get actual data for the soil property, like the infiltration of the soil, the hydraulic conductivity and how the water is going to flow through the soil so you can use that in the model. That way, you get more accurate output.”

“I think the rain simulator was probably an eye opener,” says Dr. Ogden.

The field day definitely made an impression on one of the participants.

“I liked going to the field,” says Jeremiah Lewis, an industrial engineering major from JSU. Seeing water in action made a clearer connection between the workshop projects and reality.

For another participant, Ashlee Ingram, applying real data to the model and learning about the water aspect of civil engineering were invaluable.

“I like learning different aspects of civil engineering,” she says. “It is good to know different programs. It kind of puts you ahead of other people.”

For the participants in the workshop, knowing GSSHA may do just that.

“The Army Corps in Vicksburg, Mississippi are eager to interact with these students,” Dr. Ogden says. “They asked me to have the students contact them when they’re done because we’re training them on GSSHA and that’s a skill they are always looking for people to have.”

As the workshop came to a close, participants headed home not only with new skills in watershed modeling, but also with more insight into working on group projects and the value of collaboration in science.

By: Kali S. McCrackin

Research Experience for Undergraduate Students Begins

The western United States is rampant with water issues, especially as wildfires dominate most of the summer months. To help understand water systems and ensure strong water-management plans, CI-WATER researchers are developing models. On Monday, some of these researchers will begin a month-long course with undergraduate students to teach them the importance of modeling and how models can make a difference in the future of water in the West.

The Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) begins June 17 at the University of Wyoming (UW) and will focus on high performance computing and watershed modeling. Through lectures and hands-on research students will solve complex computational science problems, learn to work in team research situations and improve programming skills. An optional, week-long course on watershed modeling systems will follow REU.

This year, REU is being led by Dr. Fred Ogden, a professor in Civil Engineering at UW, and Dr. Craig Douglas, a professor of Mathematics at the UW. Both Dr. Ogden and Dr. Douglas are researchers on the CI-WATER grant.

By Kali S. McCrackin 

A time for collaboration and discussion: The Second Annual CI-WATER Symposium

Utah science fair winners present their research at the Symposium

"How do we interact? How do we collaborate and support each other?"

These questions were among the most important asked this week at the Second Annual CI-WATER Symposium. 

With over 40 researchers working at four universities in two different states, the CI-WATER project sometimes feels disjointed. The four teams, Cyberinfrastructure, Data and Modeling Services, Watershed Modeling and Education & Outreach,  work on various parts of the project and use virtual meeting spaces for collaboration. While these virtual spaces are essential for working together from the various universities, the flow of conversation is not quite the same as in face-to-face interactions. 

The Symposium brought together the scattered partners and allowed them much-needed discussion through face time.

Dr. Miriah Meyer talks to an audience at the Symposium

The Symposium, held in Salt Lake City at the Natural History Museum of Utah’s Rio Tinto Center, focused on the idea of modeling a sustainable future. Researchers from the four CI-WATER teams presented their research and work from the last few months including projects that have been completed and where they see the next steps for their work going. Discussions about models, cyberinfrastructure and the digital divide filled the two days. Among these highly technical discussions however, presenters and team leaders returned time and again to the necessity of presenting a more unified front through a concise, clear vision statement.

Dr. Fred Ogden preps for filming

“You never know when you are going to be asked what you are studying,” said Dr. David Tarboton of Utah State University, when stressing the importance of all CI-WATER partners knowing the vision statement. 

By presenting a more unified face, collaborative efforts can be increased and our researchers can work more definitely towards the ultimate goal of the project: helping plan for the future through a better understanding of water systems and water management in the western United States. 

This year’s CI-WATER Symposium was a great success in the conversations it generated among the CI-WATER researchers, the new partnership that formed between team members, the film footage we gathered for videos that will come out later this summer, and the public event featuring Dr. Miriah Meyer. Next week we will share more from Dr. Miriah Meyer’s talk. 

By Kali S. McCrackin 

Photos by Kali S. McCrackin

The Essentials for Modeling a Sustainable Future

Tim Brewer, a consultant, shows EPSCoR intern Robin Rasmussen Mt. Moran

How do you model a sustainable future?

This is part of what CI-WATER collaborators will be discussing at the Second Annual CI-WATER Symposium next week, and the answer, in part, lies within racks of black, plastic, electronic boxes, called nodes. These boxes, complete with rows of blinking lights, may not look impressive on the outside, but they make up the supercomputers housed in Wyoming and Utah, which are vital to CI-WATER research.

A supercomputer is a collection of normal computers which operates faster and allows for higher quality computational research. One such supercomputer used by CI-WATER is Mt. Moran, housed at the University of Wyoming. Mt. Moran, which was put into production in February 2013, is an important addition to research resources at UW, because it is the first supercomputer available solely to UW researchers and their collaborators. It has opened up research capabilities and is changing the way researchers do computational research at UW.

The storage space called Bighorn

“Before, what people were doing was running computational analysis at their workstations at their desks or making small clusters,” says Timothy Kuhfuss, the director of the Advanced Research Computing Center (ARCC).

Computational analysis on these systems was slow and often required graduate students on big research projects to manage these systems when their time and skills may have been better used elsewhere. These graduate students can now work on Mt. Moran, along with their faculty advisers and UW collaborators, such as CI-WATER partners in Utah. Without this resource, researchers on the CI-WATER grant would have a harder time developing the models which will help them better understand water resources in the western United States.

Mt. Moran’s location on the UW campus is just as important as its capabilities because it adds to the environment ARCC strives for in assisting its users.

Mt. Moran

“People like someone local to work with,” says Kuhfuss. “Rather than work with someone across the country, they can literally walk into the office down the hall here and talk with one of our consultants.”

Working one on one with consultants is part of the process when using Mt. Moran and allows for more personalized use of the computing capabilities.

“We want to make it real simple,” says Kuhfuss. “Once researchers apply for an account and have one on the machine, we set up a project space for them. Then, they can look at the ‘how-to’ documentation on the webpage that we point them to. Or, if they’re not the type who wants to use those resources, they can come to our offices and sit down with a consultant who will just get them going.”

Mt. Moran requires far more power than normal computing systems

To date, Mt. Moran is at 98% of its capacity and is used by 115 researchers. CI-WATER researchers at UW rely on this resource to do the base work for their models, which they then move to the bigger NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC) outside of Cheyenne, WY. These supercomputers allow for all CI-WATER researchers to examine and evaluate the future of water in the west, through the creation of models for a sustainable future.

By Kali S. McCrackin

Photos by Kali S. McCrackin

Measurements and Modeling: A Look into the Hydrologic side of Wyoming

In the next few months, you might notice a flurry of activity and an influx of equipment in the Snowy Range, especially if you aren’t one for sticking to the trails. If you stumble upon a stream with an equipment draped tower nearby, you may have found one of the watershed research sites for the Wyoming Center for Environmental Hydrology and Geophysics (WyCEHG). Though it may look like a jumble of metal and plastic, each piece of equipment is busy acquiring important data about water to help teams of researchers at the University of Wyoming better understand water in Wyoming and the West.



A water sampler

WyCEHG was established by a five-year National Science Foundation grant with the goal of providing water resource managers, stakeholders, and scientists with cutting-edge knowledge and tools to improve water management. As the headwater state for many of its neighbors, Wyoming has to ensure that water allocations are met and that Wyoming communities still have enough water. To do this, it is essential to have a complete picture of the natural water system, which is currently not well understood. WyCEHG brings together researchers from a multitude of fields to help create this complete picture along with two support facilities: the Facility for Imaging the Near and Subsurface Environment (FINSE) and the Surface and Subsurface Hydrology Lab (SSHL). This week we’ll look at SSHL and the hydrological side of WyCEHG.

“SSHL is not just a location where equipment is stored,” says Elizabeth Traver, the faculty manager of SSHL. “It’s kind of a research and training umbrella to help people figure out what instruments they need and get them out in the field.”



A tipping bucket

Since her start at UW in December, 2012, Traver has been busy helping researchers prepare for their field work. “I’m facilitating researchers, whether they’re undergraduate students or professors, with their research and equipment,” she says. “People are telling me what they need and I’m purchasing those items so that they’ll be here when they need them.”

While the bulk of WyCEHG research will happen during the summer months, some projects are already underway. In addition to on-going field projects centered on meteorological observations linked to tree respiration, soil water and the transport of water though our mountain systems and into streams, two emerging projects focus on snow. Snow is an essential part of the hydrologic picture in Wyoming where most river and ground water comes from snowmelt. One project looks at how much water is actually coming from snow by using a snow equivalency instrument.

                “Snow can have a little or a lot of moisture in it: light, fluffy snow compared to wet, heavy snow,” says Traver. “So what a snow water equivalency instrument does is it actually tells you how much water is in the snow that fell, because the water itself is what is important and not how deep the snow is.”

The other project is about snow isotopes, or the variants of chemical elements in the snow.



“You can take the isotopes in the snow and determine the possible origin of that snow based on the isotope relationships,” Traver says.

By developing a library of isotopes in rainfall, snow, groundwater and streams, the WyCEHG team will gain a better understanding of the ultimate fate of our rain and snow and address the critical questions: does it end up back in the air through evaporation, down in the ground or glowing through our rivers?

A map of the watershed in the Snowy Range Mountains

An undergraduate student has begun to collect snow samples from around the Snow Range Ski area, which he will study using isotope analyzers. While the bulk of winter research is centered on snow sampling, researchers are also preparing for the spring thaw. The area of focus for the summer is a small unnamed creek that drains into Libby Creek, which flows into the Little Laramie River downstream from Laramie.

“There are things that we want set up before the snow starts to melt because we want to be ready for the most important time of the year, water-wise,” says Traver. “We will be putting a whole bunch of instruments on the tower with the ones already out there. We’re just trying to get as much detail as we can from that one specific area.”

The ultimate goal of studying this one watershed in so much detail is to create a water model that can be used in other watersheds.

“The idea is, measure everything, put these parameters in the model and figure out which processes are most important,” Traver says. “Then we can go to a different watershed, measure just those parameters and see if our models will work.”

This type of approach, linking measurements and models, will ultimately help water resource managers, stakeholders and scientists understand what happens to every drop of water in the watershed. This knowledge will help empower them to make scientifically founded decisions about water use and allocation.

 

By Kali S. McCrackin

Photos courtesy of WyCEHG