Changing Waters: Modeling Long-Term Fluxes of Phosphorus Under Changing Climate and Land Use in the North American Great Lakes Region

Participation in Mitacs Globalink will allow me to travel to Leipzig, Germany to pursue research at the Helmholtz-Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ). I will be working there as an undergraduate researcher within the Department of Computational Hydrosystems directly under Dr. Sabine Attinger. The aim of my project will be to learn and apply their mHM model (mesoscale Hydrologic Model). This is a unique, spatially explicit, distributed hydrologic model that uses grid cells as the primary unit and accounts for hydrologic fluxes from the hourly to the daily scale. This model will allow me to apply its framework to the Great Lakes region, which will be an expansion to my previous co-op term at the University of Waterloo, where I used the ELEMeNT model to predict trajectories for stream phosphorus loading into Lake Erie. Ultimately, this project will provide the opportunity to connect and combine two successful models in order to obtain a detailed and accurate depiction of the water quality and hydrology of watersheds contributing to the Great Lakes.

Faculty Supervisor:

Nandita Basu

Student:

Partner:

University of Potsdam

Discipline:

Mathematics

Sector:

Education

University:

University of Waterloo

Program: