James Famiglietti

Photo Credit: UC Irvine Department of Earth System Science

James S. Famiglietti holds a joint faculty appointment in earth system science and civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), where he is the Founding Director of the UC Center for Hydrologic Modeling. His research group uses satellite remote sensing to track water availability and groundwater depletion on land, and it has been working for many years toward improving hydrological prediction in regional and global weather and climate models. Famiglietti and his research group have published over 80 papers in the peer-reviewed literature.

Before joining the faculty at UCI in 2001, Famiglietti was an assistant and associate professor in the Dept. of Geological Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin, and was the Founding Associate Director of the UT Environmental Science Institute. He is the past Chair of the Board of the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science Inc. (CUAHSI) and past Editor-in-Chief of Geophysical Research Letters. He is currently leading the Community Hydrologic Modeling Platform (CHyMP) effort in the United States to accelerate the development of hydrological models for use in addressing international priorities related to water, food, economic, climate, and global security. Famiglietti has testified before Congress on his recent work on groundwater depletion in California, which was featured in the New York Times. Famiglietti appears in the upcoming documentary on water scarcity called Last Call at the Oasis, in which he discusses much of the research that he will present in his two Birdsall- Dreiss lectures.

Interested institutions should contact Famiglietti at jfamigli@ uci.edu to schedule a lecture on one of the following topics:

1. Water Cycle Change and the Human Fingerprint on the Water Landscape of the 21st Century: Observations from a Decade of GRACE
   Over the last decade, satellite observations of Earth’s water cycle from NASA’s GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) mission have provided an unprecedented view of global hydrological change and freshwater availability. Since its launch, the mission has helped to confirm that precipitation, evaporation, and continental discharge rates are increasing, that the mid-latitudes are drying while the high and low latitudes are moistening, and that the hydrologic extremes of flooding and drought are becoming even more extreme. Importantly, GRACE has exposed the human fingerprint of water management practices such as groundwater use and reservoir storage, which raises many important issues for climate, water, food, and economic security. Moreover, the GRACE mission has enabled us to peer beneath Earth’s surface and characterize the worldwide depletion of groundwater aquifers, raising significant concerns about the potential for heightened conflict over trans-boundary water resources. In this talk, Famiglietti will review the basics of how the GRACE mission observes terrestrial and global hydrology, what new information the mission has provided since its launch in 2002, and the implications for the future of water availability and sustainable water resources management.
2. A Strategy for Accelerating the Development of Hydrological Models: Societal Needs, Observational Requirements and Public Communication
   While the development of hydrological and land surface models has progressed rapidly over the past few decades, a significant acceleration in model development is required in order to address critical societal issues of water, energy, and food availability and security. In particular, major advances are needed in the areas of observations (e.g., of water cycle variability and change, of subsurface soils and hydrogeology, and of stream-flow and groundwater levels), model development (e.g., of models that integrate the major components of the human and managed water cycles), data assimilation (e.g., of algorithms that can readily incorporate in situ and remote observations of asynchronous space-time frequency), and of a framework for integrating models and data (e.g., for access to data and simulation results, for running models, and for performing analyses). In this presentation, Famiglietti will discuss these needs in detail, as well as highlight recent efforts in California and at the national scale (i.e., with the Community Hydrologic Modeling Platform [CHyMP]) to develop a modeling and data integration framework that can be applied across scales up to continental and global scales. Finally, the responsibility of the hydrologic research community to convey such important observational and simulation needs to resource managers, environmental decision and policy makers, and the general public, is underscored.