PhD proposal Defense - Mahdad Talebpour

Event: PhD proposal defense of Mahdad Talebpour

Date: Monday, June 3, 2019

Time: 2 PM

Location: TRC 206

Light refreshments will be served. 

by Mahdad Talebpour

The goals of my proposed doctoral research are twofold: (1) to build a comprehensive model for high-resolution, fully-coupled urban atmosphere-land surface-subsurface processes; (2) to use the model to reveal and quantify underlying physical mechanisms not previously described, such as effects of shallow groundwater on land-surface atmosphere interactions. Subsurface, land surface, and atmospheric processes are strongly coupled in both natural and urban landscapes. Although researchers have developed fully-coupled numerical models for natural areas, such modeling approaches do not exist for urban areas. However, stand-alone model components such as urban atmosphere-land surface and urban subsurface-land surface have performed quite successfully in investigating and predicting urban hydrological and atmospheric processes. Due to their uncoupled approaches, these models carry uncertainties associated with their outputs. For example, biases in initialization and evolution of soil moisture dynamics can lead to significant difference in atmosphere-land surface model prediction of evapotranspiration. A fully coupled model is required to investigate complex effects of large-scale urban hydrological-atmospheric processes (e.g. urban heat island effects and climate change). Research questions to be addressed include: (1) How does a fully-coupled model improve the capability to simulate interactions of shallow groundwater and atmospheric processes in urban areas? (2) How does climate change affect urban hydrological-atmospheric-processes? (3) How does the urban heat island influence urban to rural gradient of microclimatic variables?