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As part of the Water Institute's WaterTalks lecture series Professor Edson Wendland, will present “Hydrology of the 2014 São Paulo, Brazil Water Crisis”.
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Droughts are particularly critical for Brazil because of impacts on water supply and because most (70 %) of its electricity is derived from hydroelectric generation. A recent (2014) drought over Southeast Brazil exposed again the fragility of the system, compromising the water supply for 11 million people in São Paulo city. In this talk the water scarcity impacts related to this particular hydrological event as well as developed mitigation strategies will be presented. A methodology to identify linkages between meteorological and hydrological droughts as well as to anticipate the impacts of future extreme events on the hydrological system will be discussed. The approach is based on the characterization of the response time of hydrological components following the integration of ground data, remote sensing and modelling to provide estimates of future surface water availability.
Speaker Bio
Dr. Edson Wendland is Professor at the Department of Hydraulics and Sanitary Engineering (University of São Paulo, Brazil) since 2001. He holds a M.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering from the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS, Brazil) and a Dr.-Ing. (PhD) in Civil Engineering from the Ruhr-Universität Bochum (Germany). From 1996 to 1999 he was Assistant Professor at the Department of Applied Geology (Ruhr-Universität Bochum). From 1999 to 2001 he developed research in the field of Petroleum Engineering at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP, Brazil). Between 2013 and 2014 he spent a sabbatical year at the University of Minnesota at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Presently he is the Dean of the Engineering School of São Carlos at the University of São Paulo (EESC/USP).
His research focus mainly:
- Water resources evaluation based on continuous monitoring of hydrogeological data at watershed scale;
- Land use change impacts on water availability;
- Computational simulation of groundwater flow and solute transport in fractured porous media;
- Development of advanced numerical schemes based on the finite element and analytic element method.
Prior to his academic activities, he worked with Zerna, Schulz & Partner (Bochum, Germany) in Civil Engineering projects (buildings, tunnels, railways) and DMT – Deutsche Montan Technologie (Essen, Germany) in environmental projects (groundwater modeling, Geographical Information System).
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