Thursday 17^th Sept 2009

1:00 - 2:00pm Forestry Lecture Theatre

Forestry building no. 48

Watershed management and climate warming in the Sierra Nevada

David Rheinheimer, PhD Scholar, Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering and Center for Watershed Sciences, University of California, Davis

Chaired by Jamie Pittock, ANU Fenner School of Environment and Society, and co-hosted by ANU Climate and Water Initiatives

Abstract

The rivers of California’s Sierra Nevada are heavily regulated by hydropower systems. Efforts are underway to re-operate these systems for better downstream environmental flow and temperature conditions. However, climate warming is changing California’s snowmelt-driven runoff, which will, in turn, affect hydropower operations possibilities and future downstream instream environmental conditions. David will talk generally about recent and ongoing research at the University of California, Davis' Center for Watershed Sciences as related to Sierra Nevada watershed management, regional climate warming and adaptation.

David also presents his own research efforts to develop a hydropower economic optimization model that explicitly includes 1) instream flow and temperature requirements defined by variable regimes rather than fixed values and 2) climate change defined by changes in inflow hydrologic boundary conditions. The model, developed for a portion of the most complex hydroelectric and conveyance system in the USA, helps identify opportunities for re-operating specific reservoirs for downstream ecosystem management with climate change and provides insights into tradeoffs between hydropower and environmental water.

Bio

David Rheinheimer is a PhD scholar in Water Resources Engineering at the University of California, Davis.  He earned an M.S. in Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied both global and local water resources engineering and management, in particular as related to environmental water. He subsequently worked in the field collecting bathymetric and shoreline feature data for U.S. nautical charts with the U.S. National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration. After that, he joined the World Wildlife Fund (U.S.) Freshwater Science group to help produce a hydrographically conditioned high-resolution, global-scale digital elevation model. As a PhD scholar, David is currently at the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences researching ways to operate hydropower systems for better freshwater ecosystem management in the Sierra Nevada mountains, in the face of climate change and increasing demands for both water and power, using systems analysis methods.

The Fenner School Seminar Series is held in the Forestry Lecture Theatre, Forestry Building 48, Linnaeus Way (comes off Daley Road), ANU (Acton) campus, ACT

The seminar will start at 13:00 and finish at 14:00