Spatio-Temporal Patterns in Water Storage and Flows for Water Resources Management

Overview/Background:
Understanding the spatio-temporal patterns in water sources, storage and movement through different landscapes is a fundamental challenge for water resources research. Quantifying these patterns is crucial for understanding many environmental issues, including predicting climate and land use change effects, and underpinning sustainable land and water management practices to ensure water and food security under different hydroclimatological conditions (e.g. floods and droughts). Human interventions (e.g. timing and extent of agricultural practices and water requirements including drainage, irrigation, or river regulation) can lead to further spatial as well as temporal imbalances of catchment water resources. Furthermore, with increasing spatial scales, there is a striking disconnection between increasing stakeholder interests, and a decrease in our empirical evidence based knowledge of these processes. Hence, there is an urgent need for studies that assess the multiscale spatio-temporal patterns in natural and managed water storage and flow processes at larger catchment scales (up to ~100 km2).

Identifying and evaluating such spatio-temporal variability, and the role of different landscape units and human intervention therein, is therefore essential for appropriate water and land use management. This relates to both persistent patterns that affect antecedent conditions, as well as to short term storm-to-storm variations in responses and management decisions. However, our current knowledge is typically limited by (i) the paucity of long term and/or multiscale nested data to appropriately assess these spatio-temporal patterns in runoff generation and associated changes, (ii) difficulties in observing subsurface storage and flow processes directly, and (iii) the available modeling tools which are essential for the development and testing of hypotheses and predictions of change.

Aim and Objectives:

The overall aim of the proposed project is to investigate the spatio-temporal patterns and seasonal shifts in water storage and flux in different landscapes at increasing scales and to assess how these could be affected under different land use/management scenarios. The objectives of this study are to (i) evaluate (variability in) long and short term water storage and flow generation dynamics in two contrasting long term monitoring sites, (ii), identify variability in the key drivers for these spatio-temporal patterns (e.g. natural processes or management operations), (iii) use this to develop, test and apply a hydrological modelling framework to explore and predict how future land and water management affect key hydrological processes at contrasting sites under different hydro-climatological conditions, and (iv) investigate how (i-iii) change with increasing scales.

The objectives will be achieved through integrating long term data analysis with further empirical data collection and analyses, and modeling. The study will focus on two research platforms with contrasting land uses, soils and climatic conditions (in the Scottish Highlands and Lowlands) for which historical monitoring is available.

Supervisors: Dr Mark Wilkinson, Dr Andy Vinten (James Hutton Institute), Dr Josie Geris and Prof Chris Soulsby (University of Aberdeen)

Applicants should have a first-class honours degree in a relevant subject (e.g. Hydrology, Environmental Science or Engineering, Geosciences) or a 2.1 honours degree plus Masters (or equivalent). We particularly encourage applications from candidates interested in integrating field based monitoring with numerical modelling. Shortlisted candidates are interviewed in February 2015.