News

Filter by:

Limit to news where the title matches:
Limit to items where the date of the news item:
Date range
Limit to items where the date of the news item:
Limit to news items tagged with one or more of:
Limit to news items where the audience is one or more of:
Monday, February 12, 2024

Africa's Plastic Revolution

This year, from March 4 to 8, Professor Denis Aheto will be visiting the Faculty of Environment and will deliver two lectures on Africa's Plastic Revolution. Join the Faculty of Environment to learn about advancing global solutions for healthy oceans.

New machine learning model predicts lake ice conditions with 94 per cent accuracy

A University of Waterloo press release

To advance climate change monitoring and public safety, researchers at the University of Waterloo have developed new tools that bring an unprecedented level of accuracy to identifying lake ice conditions. 

The researchers are the first to use machine learning models for processing satellite radar altimetry data that can identify between open water, thin ice, growing ice, or melting ice with 94 per cent accuracy. 

The Water Institute is pleased to announce that Dr. Dustin Garrick has been appointed director of the University of Waterloo’s Collaborative Water Program for a two-year term, effective January 1, 2024. Dustin is University Research Chair in Water and Development Policy, associate professor in the School of Environment, Resources and Sustainability and a Water Institute member. Since 2011, Dr. Garrick has taught interdisciplinary water courses as part of the University of Oxford MSc in water science, policy and management, and he currently serves as the director of research for a European Commission funded doctoral training network, NEWAVE Next Water Governance, with 15 PhD students across Europe and Africa.

Water Institute Member David Rudolph, professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, is serving as conference co-chair of the 3rd International Groundwater-Agriculture Conference, Toward Sustainable Groundwater in Agriculture - Linking Science and Policy. The conference will take place June 17-20, 2024, in San Francisco and is being organized by University of California, Davis and The Water Education Foundation. The Water Institute is a cooperating organization.

Monday, December 11, 2023

Rendering a winter wonderland

A University of Waterloo press release.

As snow flurries mark the beginning of winter, a team of University of Waterloo researchers have digitized the white stuff into a new model that can be applied to better understand the impact of climate change.

SPLITSnow is a "light transport" model and is part of a larger body of research that simulates how light interacts with complex materials. While previous models exist, SPLITSnow is one of the most comprehensive models to date, which accounts for a variety of snowpack properties, such as density and water content, as well as the size and shape distributions of the individual grains. In addition, SPLITSnow attempts to account for the grains' crystalline makeup.