Laura Condon's NSF Team Launches Website to Track the Nation's Groundwater Supply to Forecast Droughts and Floods
Image Credit: Current Soil Moisture Conditions 12/23/2023 from the HydroGEN website, a project funded by the National Science Foundation
Congratulations to HAS Associate Professor Laura Condon, lead PI, on the launch of HydroGEN, an NSF-funded project that uses an AI simulator to generate groundwater forecasts for droughts and floods across the U.S. For the past several years, Condon's research has been focused on large-scale water sustainability and the dynamic behavior of managed hydrologic systems in the context of past development and future climate change. After 3 years of testing and development, the HydroGEN website has gone live. Using the AI emulator, they can now project groundwater changes over decades. The HydroGEN research project was featured in the recent KVOA Climate Matters segment by Daniel McFarland on February 19.
Condon noted, "With the machine learning emulator, we can now generate groundwater forecasts and groundwater simulations across the U.S. on demand. As things get hotter and drier one really big thing that changes is the amount of water that plants use and the amount of water that infiltrates down into the ground. If you're not focusing on groundwater and just looking at a surface water-centric approach, you're not going to get your streamflow projections right."
The highly interdisciplinary team includes members from academia, government, and private industry. Leadership at the University of Arizona includes HAS Associate Professor Laura Condon, Lead PI, and Nirav Merchant, Director, Data Science Institute. Other UArizona team members include HAS Assistant Professor Andrew Bennett, HAS doctoral student Luis de la Fuente, Project Manager Gary Forger, Regents Professor and Technical Advisor Hoshin Gupta, Software Developer Amy Johnson, Software Engineer Will Lytle, and HAS doctoral student Amanda Triplett.
Leadership at Princeton University includes Professor Reed Maxwell and Associate Professor Peter Melchior. Other Princeton team members include Software Developer George Artivanis, Project Manager Howard Cohen, Software Developer Amy Defnet, Education Specialist Lisa Gallagher, Lead Software Developer Bill Hasling, and Postdoctoral researcher Yueling Ma.
Rounding out the team is Water Manager Lindsay Bearup from the Bureau of Reclamation.
Our warmest congratulations go to Laura on achieving this milestone and kudos to the HydroGEN research team!