Morning coffee near Moab, UT
About Me
I am a Water Agency Engineer II with the Sonoma County Water Agency. In 2019, I completed a PhD with Dr. Graham Fogg in the Hydrologic Sciences Graduate Group at the University of California, Davis and in 2012 I received an MS in Hydrology from the University of Nevada, Reno.
My PhD Research
Broadly, my PhD research interests include assessing groundwater availability and sustainability in agriculturally-dominated regions in California. I use numerical groundwater models to evaluate the feasibility of groundwater recharge, assess questions related to model complexity and uncertainty, and explore feedbacks between surface water, groundwater, climate, and human systems.
Animation of groundwater recharge propagation through an alluvial aquifer system
My PhD Research Projects
Simulating Groundwater Recharge Variability in the American-Cosumnes Groundwater Basin, CA.
This research uses ParFlow and TPROGS to simulate the role of geologic heterogeneity on recharge dynamics in alluvial groundwater basins.
Evaluating Uncertainty of Regional Water Budgets in the Central Valley, CA.
This research highlights important differences in water budgets between two regional-scale groundwater models of California's Central Valley, CVHM and C2VSim. These findings are important for Groundwater Sustainability Agencies (GSAs), which are tasked with determining sustainable groundwater budgets in the Central Valley under the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA).
Water Information Transparency to Inform Water Markets
This work is the culmination of an interdisciplinary NSF IGERT program at UC Davis and CO School of Mines. In an opinion piece published in the journal Water (Maples et al., 2018), my colleagues and I argue for an incisive yet conceptually simple framework for transparent, real-time accounting of water stores and flows, including both groundwater and surface water, to inform water markets organized around a central clearinghouse.