Socio-Hydrology: Opportunities and Challenges. A Department of Systems Design Engineering Workshop

Tuesday, August 27, 2019 9:00 am - 12:00 pm EDT (GMT -04:00)

Socio-Hydrology: Opportunities and Challenges

K. Ponnambalam 1, S. Jamshid Mousavi 2, S. Fletcher 3, K.W. Hipel 1, and Dawn Parker 4

1 Professor, Department of Systems Design Engineering, University of waterloo

2 Visiting Prof. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo

3 Director of Planning and Operations, Successors’ Educational Centre, Port of Spain

4 Director, Professor, Department of Planning, Waterloo

This lecture presents basic definitions, concepts and challenges/opportunities on the emergent area of socio-hydrology, which is about studying impacts of humans and management impacts on water cycle, and the impacted water cycle on the society. Urbanization effect is an old example of such impacts, but a much wider spatio-temporal scales of interactions between societies and water systems due to global warming and climate change, and the role of complex institutional- and governance-related issues have all necessitated attention to be paid to both the science and the practical aspects of coupled human-nature systems. However, there are serious challenges, such as mismatch of temporal/spatial scales, upscaling effects, and numerically hard-to-quantify socio-institutional variables and processes, and others. Such challenges will be further clarified and explained through a number of simple, practical examples. Additionally, demonstrations of a number of tools and techniques, including the FP model for storage management, AI based water management models, agent based models, and stiff stochastic differential equations for modeling and simulation of complex human-nature systems will be presented. For those attendees who want hands-on training of some of these tools the same afternoon is allocated but it will be only for limited registered candidates (Room E7-6333).

Watch the videos from this workshop on Vimeo:

Socio-hydrology Workshop Part 1:

  • Introduction (Ponnambalam & Mousavi)

Case Studies and Tools:

  • Global Water Balance (Ponnambalam)
  • Lumped Models and Stochastic Ordinary Differential Equations (Ponnambalam)

Socio-hydrology Workshop Part 2: System-of-systems (Hipel)

Socio-hydrology Workshop Part 3: Agent-Based Models (ABM) (Ponnambalam)

Socio-hydrology Workshop Part 4: Lake Urmia Adaptation to Changes (Mousavi)

Socio-hydrology Workshop Part 5: Trinidad and Tobago, Small Island Problems (Fletcher)

Socio-hydrology Workshop Part 6: Policy and Local Urban Impacts (Parker)

Socio-hydrology Workshop Part 7: Partial Differential Equations (Ponnambalam)

Socio-hydrology Workshop Part 8: Coupled Local-Global Systems (Mousavi)