Research Blog
My research interests include high-resolution monitoring and modeling techniques to better understand groundwater flow in spatially and temporally complex geologic systems. Methods include geochemical sampling of groundwater after recharge events, fracture flow modeling, and the use of thermal imagery from drones. My study sites have included areas in Minnesota, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Florida, and now western Montana. |
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I recently attended the EuroKarst 2018 Conference in Besançon, France. This was a bi-annual conference on the hydrogeology of karst and carbonate reservoirs aimed at professional exchange between field practitioners and academic researchers. The conference was held in the Espace Grammont center in the center of town. This was an interesting new experience for me, being mostly used to your typical conference centers. Unfortunately the rooms did not have much in the way of air conditioning and the conference occurred during the middle of the heat wave currently gripping most of Europe. Appropriately for a hydrology conference, we all drank plenty of water! On top of attending many informative talks on approaches and results to flow modeling in karst settings I also presented some of my own recent research using FEFLOW to model heat and mass transport in conduits. Testing different conduit geometries (such as varying tortuosity) I presented on how this affects matrix-interaction dynamics which control thermal and mass transport responses at the spring. In the situation below, a straight conduit results in a narrow band of dispersion, producing a sharper dye recovery peak and less heat loss to the surrounding matrix, while a more tortuous conduit buffers temperature signals and creates longer dye recovery tails. I also had the chance to meet and network with some really wonderful people, one of whom lived in the nearby city of Dijon, where Darcy famously designed his fountains. For one of the evenings I took the train out to Dijon where she gave me a tour of Darcy's Fountains and some other local attractions. Considering how Darcy's work revolutionized our understanding of how water flows through porous media, you could say that many engineers and earth scientists consider this to be...holey ground? After the conference I took some extra time to explore around southern Europe. This included some stops through Switzerland (namely Bern), then down to Italy (Genoa), and then along the Mediterranean back over to France (Montpellier) before heading back up to Paris for the flight home. Overall a great conference! Learned some useful new modeling approaches and networked with some wonderful people. Will definitely have to consider going again someday!
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