MPhil opportunity: Development of an integrated water quality model for predicting indicators of Harmful Algal Blooms in inland and coastal waters

Development of an integrated water quality model for predicting indicators of Harmful Algal Blooms in inland and coastal waters

The Master research study will be conducted as part of the Artificial Intelligence-powered Forecast for Harmful Algal Blooms (AIHABs) project funded under the EU Aquatic Pollutants Joint Transnational Call 2020 (http://www.waterjpi.eu/joint-calls/joint-call-2020-aquaticpollutants). The AIHABs project consortium is led by a civil engineering research team in TU Dublin and it includes researchers from other cross-cutting disciplines in six European academic and research institutes.  The main objective of the AIHABs project is to develop an early system to forecast the occurrence, spread and fate of emerging cyanotoxins caused by Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs) in inland and coastal waters.

This Master study will build an integrated inland-coastal water quality model by combining existing stand-alone inland and coastal water quality models of two coastal water study sites in Ireland and Spain. The MIKE software (https://www.mikepoweredbydhi.com/) will be used to develop the inland-coastal integrated water quality model to simulate the hydrodynamics and the water quality transport and fate processes involved in modelling algae indicators, e.g., chlorophyll-a (chl-a), associated with cyanotoxin in coastal waters. The new integrated inland-coastal model will then be incorporated into an Artificial Intelligence forecasting system in order to predict the occurrence of harmful algal blooms.

The project methodology entails: (i) Gaining good understanding of the modelling procedure and functions of the existing stand-alone inland and coastal MIKE models, (ii) Writing a code to combine the stand-alone inland and coastal waters MIKE models in an integrated inland-coastal waters MIKE model, and (iii) Validation and testing of the developed integrated inland-coastal waters MIKE model. 

Student requirements for this project

Min 2.2 Bachelor degree (Level 8) in Civil or Environmental Engineering or any related discipline

Funding:

Full funding for a two-year MPhil study including:

Student Stipend:                 €18,500 p.a.

Materials/ Travel etc        € 1000 p.a.

Fees:                                     Up to €5,750 p.a.

All project expenses and travel.

If you are interested in submitting an application for this project, please complete an Expression of Interest (https://www.tudublin.ie/media/website/research/postgraduate-research/graduate-research-school/documents/Expression-of-Interest-form.docx) and email it to [Email Address Removed].- For enquiries please contact [Email Address Removed]