Climate Change Impacts on Natural and Built Infrastructure

At UVM we pursue the ambitious challenge of leveraging engineering knowledge and systems thinking to understand how humanity can optimally change our infrastructure and lifestyles to respond to climate change. Given the devastating consequences of climate change and natural and human-induced hazards, it is essential to develop adaptation and mitigation strategies to protect human lives, civil infrastructure and the environment. Our faculty’s research is at the forefront of developing technology and strategies to enable adaptation to climate change.

Overview

CEE faculty and student research in climate change impacts on natural and built infrastructure addresses key needs in infrastructure risk from water hazards (flooding & erosion), dam assessment, water resource structural monitoring, and precipitation and extreme event modeling.

Research Highlights

Lake Champlain Basin Resilience to Extreme Events

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Water researchers on Lake Champlain

Vermont EPSCoR was awarded a new Research Infrastructure Improvement (RII) Track-1 award on June 1, 2016 for research on Lake Champlain Basin Resilience to Extreme Events (BREE). The research will inform public policy and support economic and workforce development. Research questions examine what makes some parts of the Lake Champlain Basin and its watersheds resilient in the face of extreme weather events, increasingly common in a warming Vermont, while other parts fail to recover and rebound. The award from the National Science Foundation will help answer those questions, providing much needed information to decision-makers as they govern the basin and develop policies that reach far into the future. The five-year project will support research teams from UVM and colleges across the state that will collect data from sensors in streams, soil, and the lake.

CEE Faculty: Arne Bomblies, Donna Rizzo, Scott Hamshaw, Mandar Dewoolkar, Elizabeth Doran, George Pinder

UVM Collaborators: Asim Zia, Chris Koliba, Carol Adair, Andrew Schroth, Beverley Wemple, Julia Perdrial, Bill Gibson, Patrick Clemins

Collaborating Institutions and Organizations: Vermont Agency of Natural Resources, Lake Champlain Basin Program, EPA

Multi-Objective Optimization to Examine Tradeoffs in River Reconnection Projects

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River Optimization graphic

Floodplain and river reconnection projects show great promise to restore water quality, improve flood resilience and enhance habitats.  However, with the exponential availability of environmental sensors and associated information, resource managers and planners need decision-support tools to help identify the more effective locations and techniques for floodplain reconnection.  Our team is developing multi-objective optimization algorithms to assess multiple stakeholder criteria that prioritize suites of restoration or conservation projects at river network and basin scales. These algorithms may be wrapped around existing hydraulic models (2D HEC-RAS, HAND) or databases (VTANR stream geomorphic data sets) to evolve solutions that optimally meet flood resiliency and water quality goals while simultaneously addressing stakeholder needs. This research is being advanced under several projects supported by the VT Agency of Transportation, VT Department of Environmental Conservation, Lake Champlain Sea Grant, Lake Champlain Basin Program, and the VT Water Resources & Lake Studies Center.

CEE Faculty: Kristen Underwood, Donna Rizzo, Mandar Dewoolkar

UVM Collaborators: Rebecca Diehl, Beverley Wemple

Collaborating Institutions and Organizations: Vermont Agency of Transportation, Vermont Agency of Natural Resources, Vermont Land Trust, The Nature Conservancy of Vermont, Gund Institute for Environment

Research Topics
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  • Precipitation and extreme event modeling
  • Dam assessment
  • Water resource structural modeling
  • Infrastructure risk
  • Water hazards (flooding and erosion)
Graduate Study in Climate Change Impacts on Natural and Built Infrastructure
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Highlighted courses are listed below:

  • CEE 7900 – Reliability of Engineering Systems
  • CEE 5980 – Numerical Methods for Engineering
  • CEE 4600 – Hydrology
  • CEE 5620 – Advanced Hydrology
  • CEE 7980 – Applied Geostatistics

Faculty Researchers

CEMS Acting Dean Mandar Dewoolkar

Mandar Dewoolkar

Acting Dean, College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences • Professor, Department of Civil and Enivronmental Engineering

mdewoolk@uvm.edu

Geotechnical and geoenvironmental engineering; transportation geotechnics, hazard mitigation; geotechnical aspects of space exploration; cultural preservation; engineering education

Arne

Arne Bomblies

Assistant Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

abomblie@uvm.edu

Environmental Engineering, Hydrology.

Kristen Underwood

Kristen Underwood

Research Assistant Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Kristen.Underwood@uvm.edu

Hydrology, Fluvial Geomorphology, Geostatistics, Catchment Dynamics, Clustering & Classification, Infrastructure & Hazard Mitigation, Bayesian Inference

Elizabeth Doran

Elizabeth M. B. Doran

Research Assistant Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Elizabeth.Doran@uvm.edu

Urban climate; land use and land cover change;
social-ecological systems; systems modeling