Research Interests
My research centers on how to best observe and represent hydrologic processes at multiple scales. This covers topics ranging from capturing spatiotemporal patterns in water systems using advanced geostatistical methods to identifying the role of landscape in defining dominant hydrologic processes and pathways.
Currently, my work focuses on improving our conceptual understanding of catchment-scale hydrological and biogeochemical flux dynamics and their coupled responses to climate change in northern latitude basins. This research involves using various hydrological modeling approaches across scales in combination with field observations and experimental studies at the well-controlled experimental Krycklan (boreal) and Abisko (tundra/taiga) catchments in northern Sweden.
It is clear that understanding the impacts of climate change on hydrologic systems is one of the largest problems faced by today's research hydrologists. Typically, we think of the hydrologic response of a catchment as being forced by climate (precipitation and solar radiation) and controlled by the structure of the catchment (geology and topography). Climatic changes could lead to significant changes in structure and, subsequently, hydrologic response. For example, in cold regions impermeable frozen zones in the soil (e.g., permafrost in tundra systems or soil frost in boreal mires) create a more 'dynamic' catchment structure that directly determines the flow pathways water takes in the landscape. Understanding the role of this structure is a key component of modeling the coupled climate/hydrologic/biogeochemical cycle.
Hydrologists need an increasingly cross-disciplinary view spanning several scales of interaction. It is at the boundaries of traditional hydrology where future research directions can be found. Water is one common language with which natural systems communicate across system boundaries and scales. Fluxes across the land-surface directly influence the predictions of ecological processes, atmospheric dynamics, and terrestrial hydrology. My current research utilizes cross-disciplinary efforts to identify and quantify feedbacks between terrestrial and atmospheric water at appropriate spatiotemporal scales and develop better couplings of the hydrologic and biogeochemical systems in the next generation of modeling approaches.
This avenue of research continues to be the basis for my research agenda allowing me to incorporate strengths from my previous independent research. Ongoing multi-scale investigations in central Africa, for example, demonstrate that analyzing at local versus regional scales can lead to different interpretations of how the water cycle changes. It is evident that changes in local and regional water and land use lead to significant variations in the local and regional coupled hydro-climatic system.
Here are some links to research groups I have been working with:
