Upmanu Lall | |
---|---|
Alma mater | University of Texas at Austin IIT Kanpur |
Scientific career | |
Institutions | Arizona State University Columbia University |
Thesis | Value of data in relation to uncertainty and risk (1981) |
Upmanu Lall is an Indian-American engineer and founding director of the Water Institute at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University. Lall also has a faculty appointment as professor in the School of Complex Adaptive Systems within the College of Global Futures. Prior to joining ASU in January 2024, Lall was the Alan and Carol Silberstein Professor of Engineering at Columbia University. He served as founding director of the Columbia Water Center. Lall studies how to solve water scarcity and how to predict and mitigate floods. In 2014, he was awarded the Henry Darcy Medal by the European Geosciences Union. [1] He was named an American Geophysical Union Fellow in 2017 and their Walter Langbein Lecturer in 2022. He was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2018, and has received the Arid Lands Hydrology and the Ven Te Chow Awards from the American Society of Civil Engineers. In April 2021 he was named to the “Hot List of the world’s 1,000 top climate scientists” by Reuters. [2]
Lall was born in 1956 in Dharamsala, Himanchal Pradesh, India. He studied Civil Engineering at IIT Kanpur, and graduated in 1976. He earned his Masters and Doctorate in Civil & Environmental Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, in 1981. His doctoral research considered the value of data in uncertainty and risk. [3] Lall was trained in hydrology and water resources, but recognized the importance of hydrologic systems analysis, statistics and climate dynamics. In the 1990s he got interested in climate change, nonlinear dynamics and applied functional analysis.[ citation needed ] These interests led to significant contributions in nonparametric function estimation, [4] applied statistics and hydroclimatic predictability. [5]
Lall works on hydrology, climate dynamics and water systems. He currently serves as the director of the Water Institute, a new program at Arizona State University launched in 2024 designed to predict and address water challenges from community to national to global scales. Lall previously served as director at the Columbia Water Center, where he looked at water scarcity, hydroclimatic extremes, infrastructure issues and risk. Lall developed a Global Flood Initiative, which predicts, manages and controls floods from a global climate dynamics perspective, and a Global Water Sustainability Initiative, which concentrates on water scarcity and risks. [6] He was one of the first to identify the significance of climate teleconnections (climate anomalies that are related to one another over long distances) in terrestrial hydrology. [7] Lall's current work focuses on a research program called the America's Water initiative, which seeks to develop sustainable water management and infrastructure investment strategies, and to strengthen resilience to the changing climate. [8] [9]
Lall has been involved in policy making and science communication, including providing insight at the World Economic Forum. [10] [11] He initiated the establishment of the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, and is Editor-in-Chief of the Elsevier journal Water Security. [12]
Hydrology is the scientific study of the movement, distribution, and management of water on Earth and other planets, including the water cycle, water resources, and drainage basin sustainability. A practitioner of hydrology is called a hydrologist. Hydrologists are scientists studying earth or environmental science, civil or environmental engineering, and physical geography. Using various analytical methods and scientific techniques, they collect and analyze data to help solve water related problems such as environmental preservation, natural disasters, and water management.
The American Geophysical Union (AGU) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization of Earth, atmospheric, ocean, hydrologic, space, and planetary scientists and enthusiasts that according to their website includes 130,000 people. AGU's activities are focused on the organization and dissemination of scientific information in the interdisciplinary and international fields within the Earth and space sciences. The geophysical sciences involve four fundamental areas: atmospheric and ocean sciences; solid-Earth sciences; hydrologic sciences; and space sciences. The organization's headquarters is located on Florida Avenue in Washington, D.C.
Robert Elmer Horton was an American hydrologist, geomorphologist, civil engineer, and soil scientist, considered by many to be the father of modern American hydrology. An eponymous medal is awarded by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) to recognize outstanding contributions to the field of hydrological geophysics. The AGU Hydrology section was formed largely due to his personal property that was bequeathed to AGU.
Rafael Luis Bras is a Puerto Rican civil engineer best known for his contributions in surface hydrology and hydrometeorology, including his work in soil-vegetation-atmosphere system modeling.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to hydrology:
Jasper A. Vrugt is a Dutch scientist/engineer/applied mathematician known for his work in the earth sciences: surface hydrology, soil physics, hydrogeophysics, hydrometeorology, and geophysics. Vrugt is an assistant professor at the University of California, Irvine and holds a joint appointment in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Department of Earth System Science. He also holds a part-time appointment as associate professor at the University of Amsterdam, Faculty of Science (CGE).
Soroosh Sorooshian is an Iranian-born American civil engineer, and educator. He is a distinguished professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Irvine and currently serving as the Director of the Center for Hydrometeorology and Remote Sensing.
Murugesu Sivapalan is an Australian-American engineer and hydrologist of Sri Lankan Tamil origin and a world leader in the area of catchment hydrology. He is currently the Chester and Helen Siess Endowed Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and professor of Geography & Geographic Information Science, at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Sivapalan is widely recognized for his fundamental research on scale issues in hydrological modeling, his leadership of global initiatives aimed at hydrologic predictions in ungauged basins, and for his role in launching the new sub-field of socio-hydrology.
Diane McKnight is a distinguished professor of civil, environmental, and architectural engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder and a fellow at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR). McKnight is a founding principal investigator of the National Science Foundation's Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) program in the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica.
Peter John Webster is a meteorologist and climate dynamicist relating to the dynamics of large-scale coupled ocean-atmosphere systems of the tropics, notably the Asian monsoon. Webster holds degrees in applied physics, mathematics and meteorology. Webster studies the basic dynamics of the coupled ocean-atmosphere system in the tropics and has applied this basic knowledge to developing warning systems for extreme weather events in Asia. He has served on a number of prestigious national and international committees including the World Climate Research Program's Joint Scientific Committee (1983-1987), chaired the international Tropical Ocean Global Atmospheric (TOGA) organizing committee (1988–94) and was co-organizer of the multinational TOGA Couple Ocean-Atmosphere (1993). He is Emeritus Professor in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Institute of Technology and co-founder and Chief Scientist of Climate Forecast Applications Network LLC, a weather and climate services company.
Dara Entekhabi is the Bacardi and Stockholm Water Foundations Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research spans a variety of topics in hydrology, including land-atmosphere interactions, surface water - groundwater interactions, data assimilation, and remote sensing.
Professor Günter Blöschl is an Austrian hydrologist, engineer and academic.
Georgia "Gia" Destouni is a Professor of Hydrology at Stockholm University. She works on the Baltic Sea Region Programme as well as studying the impact of climate change on societies in Northern Europe. She is the chair of the Global Wetland Ecohydrology Network (GWEN) and was involved with the National Geosphere Laboratory.
Audrey Hucks Sawyer is an American hydrogeologist and Assistant Professor of Earth Science at Ohio State University. Her work has focused on quantifying the role of groundwater - surface water interactions in transporting nutrients, contaminants, and heat in rivers and coastal settings. Sawyer has won multiple awards, including the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2018 and the Kohout Early Career Award in 2016.
Amir AghaKouchak is an Iranian American civil engineer, academic and researcher. He is a Professor of Civil Engineering, Environmental Engineering, and Earth System Science at University of California, Irvine.
Giuliano Di Baldassarre is a professor of hydrology at Uppsala University and the Director of the Centre of Natural Hazards and Disaster Science, Sweden. He was awarded the American Geophysical Union Whiterspoon Lecture in 2020 and the European Geosciences Union Plinius Medal in 2021.
Marc Brendan Parlange is an American academic, recognised for his research expertise in environmental fluid mechanics and research in hydrology and climate change. His contributions primarily relate to the measurement and simulation of air movement over complex terrain, with a focus on how atmospheric turbulence dynamics influence urban, agricultural and alpine environments and wind energy. He has also been active in addressing water resources challenges and environmental change in remote communities, particularly West Africa.
Dörthe Tetzlaff is a German hydrologist who is Professor of Ecohydrology at Humboldt University zu Berlin and Head of Department at the Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries, Berlin, Germany, since 2017. Tetzlaff was appointed Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2017, Fellow of the American Geophysical Union in 2018, Honorary Fellow of the Geological Society of America in 2019, Fellow of the European Academy of Sciences in 2022 and Member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 2023.
Ying Fan Reinfelder is a Chinese–American earth scientist who is a professor and researcher in the Rutgers University Institute of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences. She is interested in climate dynamics and the global water cycle. She was named a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union in 2022.