ENAC Seminar Series by Dr P. Benettin
Event details
| Date | 28.05.2021 |
| Hour | 09:00 › 09:45 |
| Speaker | Dr Paolo Benettin |
| Location | Online |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
09:00 – 09:45 – Dr P. Benettin
Research Scientist at EPFL, Switzerland
Tracing the water balance through transport models and field experiments
Catchments are the place where water interacts with the landscape to support terrestrial life, including human’s. They can be seen as large and heterogeneous biogeochemical reactors, or as fundamental organizing structures for landforms and ecosystems. From a water management point of view, catchments are the ideal domain to formulate and close the water balance. But simply closing the water balance offers no insight into the actual time that water and solutes spend in the subsurface before being evaporated or drained to a river network. Tracing the water balance is the needed next step to understand which water sustains vegetation and feeds streams and to improve our management of water resources. This can be achieved by coupling transport models to experimental tracer data. This seminar will illustrate 1) what we learned in terms of water age from the use of parsimonious transport models, and 2) what we learned from controlled experiments using water stable isotopes as tracers. Taken together, these results provide an integrated view of the next experimental and theoretical challenges in catchment science and show that catchments are fertile land for new development and discoveries.
Short bio:
Paolo Benettin is a research scientist in the Laboratory of Ecohydrology at EPFL. He owns a master and a Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering from University of Padova, Italy. In 2010 he spent a semester at Wageningen University, NL and in 2014 he spent 7 months as visiting research fellow at the department of Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation at Virginia Tech University, USA. In 2015 he joined EPFL, first as a postdoc and then as research scientist. His main research field is catchment science, with special interest in hydrologic transport and travel time distributions. His work aims at bridging theories of transport at catchment scale with experimental evidence from field measurements. Recent work includes theoretical and experimental methods that involve water stable isotopes as tracers.
Research Scientist at EPFL, Switzerland
Tracing the water balance through transport models and field experiments
Catchments are the place where water interacts with the landscape to support terrestrial life, including human’s. They can be seen as large and heterogeneous biogeochemical reactors, or as fundamental organizing structures for landforms and ecosystems. From a water management point of view, catchments are the ideal domain to formulate and close the water balance. But simply closing the water balance offers no insight into the actual time that water and solutes spend in the subsurface before being evaporated or drained to a river network. Tracing the water balance is the needed next step to understand which water sustains vegetation and feeds streams and to improve our management of water resources. This can be achieved by coupling transport models to experimental tracer data. This seminar will illustrate 1) what we learned in terms of water age from the use of parsimonious transport models, and 2) what we learned from controlled experiments using water stable isotopes as tracers. Taken together, these results provide an integrated view of the next experimental and theoretical challenges in catchment science and show that catchments are fertile land for new development and discoveries.
Short bio:
Paolo Benettin is a research scientist in the Laboratory of Ecohydrology at EPFL. He owns a master and a Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering from University of Padova, Italy. In 2010 he spent a semester at Wageningen University, NL and in 2014 he spent 7 months as visiting research fellow at the department of Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation at Virginia Tech University, USA. In 2015 he joined EPFL, first as a postdoc and then as research scientist. His main research field is catchment science, with special interest in hydrologic transport and travel time distributions. His work aims at bridging theories of transport at catchment scale with experimental evidence from field measurements. Recent work includes theoretical and experimental methods that involve water stable isotopes as tracers.
Practical information
- General public
- Invitation required
- This event is internal
Organizer
- ENAC
Contact
- Cristina Perez