Cedric Shy (00:01) So welcome, Dr. Krista Brelsford with the Los Alamos National Lab and Dr. Sabagia Rathor with the Oak Ridge National Lab. Krista, you want to go ahead and just tell us about yourself, your background? Christa (00:17) Yeah, sure. So I'm a research scientist at Los Alamos National Lab in the global security division. And most of what my work has focused on for the last decade or so really has been understanding interactions between human processes and the built-in natural environment. A lot of the problems that we care about are well modeled by natural systems science, or engineers, or infrastructure systems. but they have human consequences in the human system. So I've been, for a long time, I've been trying to beat that bridge. Cedric Shy (00:50) Great. And Dr. Rothera, do you want to introduce yourself as well? Saubhagya Rathore (00:54) Yes, sure. I am a staff scientist at Oak Ridge National Lab. I'm in Environmental Sciences Division and I'm watershed hydrologist and more of a computational model, computational modeler. Basically, in simple terms, I use ⁓ process-based models of watershed and river basin scale and big computers to solve water related problems, be it quality, quantity or floods. Cedric Shy (01:18) Amazing. Which leads us right into the water team. So you guys are on the water team for our project. So can you tell us just kind of like 50,000 foot view, what are you guys doing on the water team? And also just like what got you into this sort of research yourself? Saubhagya Rathore (01:34) When water was pumped out of groundwater wells, I always wondered where this water coming from. And that got me interested in hydrogeology and groundwater flow dynamics and slowly made my way to ⁓ watershed scale hydrology. In water theme, are in in Cedric Shy (01:38) Yeah. Saubhagya Rathore (01:50) at 60,000 feet view, we are trying to see how flood risk in our study area, which is Port Arthur Beaumont in Southeast Texas, will look like two to three decades ahead when we will have different patterns of storms that are coming in, different intensity, different frequency, and different duration. how future cities would look like, different urbanization patterns. Under those scenarios, what kind of flood risk we'll see. And with that in mind, we are using process-based models that are rooted in physics in which we can have trust, not only in the current conditions, but also in the future conditions when we try to simulate future conditions. With this objective in mind, and we also have, we also... I'm interacting with the co-design team where we will have different infrastructure scenarios. So future cities, future strong patterns and future infrastructure. With this objective, we have diverse range of team and expertise under the water team. I am part of hydrology modeling team. where I the task of developing a hydrological modeling framework that can model watershed scale hydrology or river basin scale hydrology that captures basin response, what would happen upstreams, how that propagates downstream, and how within that basin context we represent these small scale engineered features that are designed for efficiency. So they have outsized impact and we do want to have them represented in the models. And then we also have people working on how we bring in data about future climatology and storms, future hurricanes, so that we can feed in our hydrology models. Then we have teams, and Krista will talk more about connections with the community and the stakeholders. system, coastal system. They provide a lot of services in terms of flood protection, shore stabilization, and also ecological services. We have team who are collecting data on the wetlands and also doing modeling. We also have... teams that are collecting water level data. We have a wide range of sensors across the domain. And then we have a team working on taking those outputs from hydrological models, which are still at course resolution and downscaling them so that we can reach to one meter to three meter flood inundation maps. So yeah, this is a quite diverse team and it involves Cedric Shy (04:21) Yeah, it sounds like a lot. Saubhagya Rathore (04:23) Yeah, I just got that and it involves multiple institutions from UT Austin, Lamar University are the main ones and Los Alamos National Library along with Oak Ridge. Cedric Shy (04:32) Yeah, Colchristi, would you want to expand on anything about the team or anything about some of stuff you're doing too? Christa (04:37) Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I think is really, cool about this project as a whole is that we built in enough time for the sort of natural science and disciplinary hydrologists to be able to really collaborate with a group of researchers at other institutions focusing on the social science aspects of it, whether that's sort of pure understanding of interactions between hydrology and social systems or on the What in a different world, might say the operation side, the co-production side where the hydrologists can genuinely work with and interact with ⁓ community groups and what we call our co-production team, which is a group of researchers who've organized a set of community groups that provide sort of a sounding board for us to collaborate on how best to solve actual problems in this area that people care about. It's wonderful to have a really good hydrological map. of the likelihood of flooding under either now or in the past or in the future. But that's not enough to know how to solve problems. Cedric Shy (05:40) So I guess I'm just curious for an everyday person thinking about their community, their neighborhood, how does what you're doing differ from, let's say, what FEMA's maps, their floodplain maps show? And what are some of the differences and benefits of some of your work? Christa (06:01) so water managers and people and real estate developers use, we all know that Beaumont is a flood prone area, that it's at risk of flooding from the rivers, from the oceans, from storms, from hurricanes. We all know that. And so lots of different people in the area and outside. use our best guesses to figure out where we should build new roads or where we should build new houses or what the potential consequences are of building an apartment building where it might flood. And in order to do that, we need a good understanding of, or we make guesses, sometimes just wild guesses and sometimes educated guesses about where it might flood in the future. And the hydrology team has been sort of working hard on improving those guesses from wild guesses to educated guesses. Saubhagya Rathore (06:52) And at the same time, the rain intensity is so high that your drainage systems, your stormwater sewers on the road cannot drain fast enough. So you get direct rain, fluvial flooding, right? When all of this happens together, then that's called compound flooding. So we need modeling framework that can capture all these drivers. Now, FEMA maps are a good starting point. But if we are designing infrastructure, to actually solve flooding in the neighborhoods, have to account for all the drivers of flooding. In this particular region, it becomes much more complicated than that. It's a region, water movement is heavily managed with infrastructure, and those infrastructures interact with the background hydrology. So there's a two-way feedback. And just one... Cedric Shy (07:39) And when you say highly managed, what kind of infrastructure do you mean? Saubhagya Rathore (07:44) Yes, so in a traditional hydrology water will move from high point to low point. It's driven by gravity, right? Here its region is very flat and often part of the Port Arthur part is below the sea level. So it's surrounded by levee. That's one thing. Water from the Port Arthur region, which is managed by Drainage District 7, and that's just one example, right? They are similar in Vermont. water is moved from pump stations, this is called stage-based pump station, that are pumping water from lower elevation to higher elevation. It's against the gravity, right? And the water is moved through this. canals. So it's a different mode of moving water fast and draining these landscapes. Water is often detained temporarily in this big detention basins as big as multiple soccer fields and then put back in the drainage system. So there's all this what we call artificially managed or human managed movement of water which have to be accounted for because they are sometimes even though they are small scale, their impact is can outsize or compete with the impact of the entire watershed. Cedric Shy (08:55) So, and despite all of that infrastructure, there's been significant flood impacts in Beaumont, Port Arthur. Saubhagya Rathore (09:03) Right, so this problem is evolving and there multiple reasons for it. And I'm sure Christa have some insights on the people side of things. as we, there are a few things, right? As we put impervious surface. Cedric Shy (09:15) Mm-hmm. Saubhagya Rathore (09:21) water doesn't infiltrate in the soil. So we are interrupting that natural water cycle. And which means the water that hits these impervious surfaces, it runs out faster. So that's one impact of urbanization, right? You are not allowing the natural cycle of water to. The second is, of course, Cedric Shy (09:26) Mm-hmm. Saubhagya Rathore (09:38) there's storms, their frequency, their duration, their intensity have changed. So that's another pattern we see in terms of changing flood risk, people movement. And this infrastructure also aging, they have to be constantly updated to keep up with the conditions changing. For example, recently alligator bayou. ⁓ pump station, is a outlet of the watershed that has been expanded. They added multiple additional pumps there. They are talks of expanding the Halbuti, which was a big detention basin, and we thought that was the biggest I have seen in my life, and they're adding twice the capacity of that. So you can imagine that the local water managers are trying to keep up with the evolving flood risk. I think what we're trying to bring here is you can think locally within your domain and come up with these strategies and often putting a culvert here or trying to add pump station. But there's also a value in looking at a broader regional perspective. As you know, the water has a directionality. Whatever happens upstream, be it more impervious surface, be it the hurricane stalling there, it will come downstream, right? So we can also think in terms of regional perspective. And that's what we are trying to do in this project, where we're looking at the two scales when we are evaluating the scenarios, right? One is this very local engineered solution, which is Herbuti expansion. And another one is more of a flood-prone protection, a kind of expansion of wetland that has its own impact of slowing down water movement from the landscape towards the rivers and further down to the cities. Christa (11:19) And it's important to think about this both in the context of what's happening now with the water system and also what happens with the system in the future. Many features of sort of the land and the landscape will stay the same, but there are, as Sabagia said, there's changes in frequency and duration of storm events, changes in the natural environment, and then there's also important changes in the engineered system. Right? The cities grow and so as they grow, as more people move there, there's more impervious surfaces and that also changes the hydrology. Cedric Shy (11:46) Mm-hmm. Yes, a lot of things are shifting and changing and you guys are trying to your best projections of what's happening and how the water will move. So Sabagia, I know your team, know a lot of your work was on modeling and kind of scenarios. So can you take us through some of that? Like what exactly were you modeling for in Southeast Texas? And what are some of those scenarios you were looking at? I think you said you mentioned it was with that Halbooty pump station. Saubhagya Rathore (12:16) So. ⁓ Partly our approach is we are using integrated hydrology capability in ATS, it's advanced test simulator. It's DOE state of the art multi-physics code. And when I say integrated, I mean we are solving flow both above ground and below ground and the interactions. Why is it important? As you might know that if it rains on a wet soil, you will have more runoff because water cannot infiltrate further. Soil is at its capacity. If it rains on a dry soil, we will see some infiltration and only part of the rain will run off. So to be able to simulate this, we need to also model the soil moisture, wetness, the whole thing from above ground below ground. So that's our objective. So we're doing watershed scale integrated hydrology model. two features When we are developing model, we divide our... domain or region into the small computational pieces or bits, we call themselves. And when we say unstructured, they could be of any shape and size. It could be triangle, pentagon, hexagon, quadrilateral. This gives us flexibility to kind of represent these small engineered features that we talked about, detention basins, canals, stitches, very, very conveniently in our model. So that's the innovation that one of the innovations we are deploying here. Cedric Shy (13:36) and those shapes correspond to what's on the ground. Say for instance in Southeast Texas. Saubhagya Rathore (13:37) Yes. Yes, because the domain is so complicated with all these drainage features, this allows us to represent those drainage features explicitly. And not only do that explicitly, but do that at a larger scale, at the full nature space in scale. So that's the unique feature. And second is, have, it is deployed this multi-physics framework where... Cedric Shy (13:45) Mm-hmm. Saubhagya Rathore (14:03) you have this, we can plug in our own new model components like in this case we had to add pump stations which were new additions we made without changing the entire code. So imagine you have a very complex machine and it has these open sockets, you can bring your own device plug in without taking apart the whole machine. So this was very easy for us to add these new infrastructure components in the model. Once we had that, we had... two simulation campaigns. One is we developed a hydrology model for the entire Nature River Basin, 30,000 kilometers square, nearly, that allows us to model how the flood waves get propagated from the upstream and all those things I talked about earlier, upstream impacts. And we developed a high resolution model for alligator bio. And that allows us to look at engineered features and infrastructure on Helbuti expansion. So Alan Simms from the Energy 57, manager at Energy 57 in Jefferson County, been a great asset and been a great partner in this research in terms of... guiding us, providing anecdotes, what problems they're seeing there, what questions they have, and how we can help them to answer. So one of the obvious scenario was they had a plan of herbuty expansion, almost doubling the capacity, and their initial analysis was a simple spreadsheet calculations. So when we... presented some of our initial modeling work, they were really appreciating and they thought that this really complicated and sophisticated model can actually help them put forward their case of some of these infrastructure projects and build confidence in what they're doing. Similarly, for the regional scenario, for the nature-specific model that I discussed earlier, the large-scale model, we are planning to... scenarios around floodplain buyback and wetland expansion for big ticket. And our point of contact there is Ellen Buchanan. I she is president of Big Ticket Nature Preserve Heritage Fund, think. Something like that. You can correct me there. Big Ticket, yes. So that's like the two scales of scenario. And that's what I want to highlight here, that modeling framework here. Cedric Shy (16:12) Yeah, the big thicket. She just says the big thicket. Saubhagya Rathore (16:23) And I also want to make clear that we are trying to not do small, we're not trying to do a near term forecasting, we're trying to do two, three decades of projection. So there's a difference in there. We're not trying to replace engineering models that will go when they actually have finalized the project and they're And then the dynamic part of it, right? You have this natural water cycle, and then you have the infrastructure interacting with it. So when you, let's say, you are emptying the Halkuti detention basin back into the canals, or canals moving water into the detention basin, how that interacts with the background hydrology below ground, above ground. So that dynamic two-way feedback is again what sets apart this modeling framework where we can not only just have the flood maps, we can also see how that flood map changes with the infrastructure, how with the expansion, pump stations, increase the capacity, those kinds of things. So that's the major difference. Cedric Shy (17:18) It's really cool. how is the, how are you able to simulate some of the future conditions in your model? Saubhagya Rathore (17:28) All right, for the future condition, we have a dedicated team that are expert in simulating future conditions, be it the storm patterns, be the timing, be the frequency. We have a scientist, Dr. Fong Lee, and he developed a hurricane simulator, which can... which can model hurricane tracks in future and what kind of rainfalls they'll bring in. And in terms of future urbanization pattern, we have another team working on using AI to see the urbanization patterns from the past and develop the impervious maps or urbanization patterns of the future. So that's how we'll get an... let's say that's a future urbanization or how cities will look in future. And for infrastructure, that's more of a, say, it doesn't, it's more driven by policies, right? So we actually are in touch with stakeholders who have been thinking about this infrastructure, these projects, and they are guiding us and providing us what they think. is meaningful, important for them, which we also think is scientifically interesting. So it's kind of a two-way conversation and a handshake ⁓ between good science and meaningful science and impactful science. Cedric Shy (18:45) Mm-hmm. Christa (18:48) And I will say that including the opportunity of future urban growth in these models is relatively unique in this scientific domain. ⁓ A lot of science on, a lot of forward-looking science, we've got rich models about the future of the earth system, but we don't have as much, we don't have as many existing models about how future land cover, how future urban patterns might, Cedric Shy (18:56) Mm-hmm. Christa (19:11) how urbanization might change in the future. But both of these features really influence the hydrological impacts and also then the human risks and potential costs. So it's, I think one of the coolest parts about this project is so we got to do both. Cedric Shy (19:28) That's great. Saubhagya Rathore (19:29) And I'll say one more thing, it's a little technical. don't know. So one unique part of our models is we try to minimize or not calibrate. And by calibrate, I mean, if you have simpler model, what you do is you fine tune your parameter until you get good match with the field data, right? And then you say it's a good model. But then you've done the good match with the field data and you change the conditions to future conditions, your match is no longer relevant because you've fitted your parameters for those. like current conditions. What we do differently is our models are rooted in the right physics and capture as much detail in our domain as possible, which means that we get the right answers for right reasons, rooted in right physics, and we can trust the models even if we change those conditions, which means if we change the imperviousness or storm types. Cedric Shy (20:21) So then how do you hope decision makers will use this data and information? Saubhagya Rathore (20:30) We already, Alan Sims from Dynamics 27, they're already in touch, they've already asked for some of the simulations. And they said the initial calculations for Hulbuti expansions were a simple spreadsheet calculation. And now we have done it using more dynamic models. So they can see how far those impacts propagate and they have more confidence in their plan. Cedric Shy (20:33) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Saubhagya Rathore (20:58) Also, this comparison of strategies across scales is something that is unique because individually, that's a geneticistic experiment, they will always focus on that small domain, right? So our project is kind of bringing these different, let's say, stakeholders together so they can also think together. Their efforts, they are on the same table. Their other efforts, initiatives going on. But this is from a technical side of view, right? In the unified model, we're modeling these two range. And it's also kind of a good template that whenever this kind of research or opportunity arises, it's... It's more meaningful to think of research questions which are high risk, high reward, and not try to see it as a replacement of routine engineering modelings that is being done. Think of it as something that is complementary that generally will not be funded by, let's say, it's a research, right? So it doesn't have a direct operation implication. So it won't be funded by local authorities. Cedric Shy (21:54) Mm-hmm. Saubhagya Rathore (22:01) national labs can bring some of these capabilities and resources to answer some of these high-risk high reward questions. Cedric Shy (22:07) helping them think about those difficult questions in a different way maybe. Saubhagya Rathore (22:11) Exactly. Christa (22:14) And so the other thing is that when we work with stakeholders, one of the things that that lets us do is ask the right science questions, right? That, you know, when we sit here and we spend a lot of time thinking about the theoretical implications of how we describe risk or the different strategies for the best way of modeling hydrology, that's important and that's fun. But in the Department of Energy, we also want our science to be useful. In their best iterations, the labs exist to do science to serve the public good. And when we have the opportunity to work with stakeholders like this, then we can start to figure out where the science gaps are that are influencing potential uses of our science, their ability to actually use it and understand it. So up until this project, ⁓ including infrastructure, including engineered infrastructure in a model in ATS, which had previously only been used in primarily natural systems hadn't been done yet. And Sabagia and his colleagues developed the capability to include infrastructure because without infrastructure, we can't answer the questions that ⁓ water managers in Beaumont specifically and in cities nationwide, the questions that are most important for them. In the same way, the risk work that I did Although I haven't shopped it out to stakeholders yet, there's a gap between raw hydrological exposure to a particular hazard and what its consequences are in a human system. It's important to understand the hydrological hazard, but it's also important to understand where it has social and economic consequences for cities because we can't block all flooding. We need to be efficient in how we think about mitigating it. and having a quantitative framework for characterizing relative risk across different places is one way of doing that. Cedric Shy (24:02) That's great. thinking, just can you tell us a little bit more about how your team just interacted with stakeholders and even for just maybe other researchers listening, how they could enhance their research with local knowledge and stakeholders and stuff like that. Saubhagya Rathore (24:22) Right, so I can start first. When we are trying to a catchment or a domain where we have lot of human infrastructure, most of the time researchers are heavily limited by not having data about the infrastructure. And as I said, even though some of these ditches are so narrow or pump stations in space are like local, like 10 meter wide. they have the impact is huge. It doesn't matter you do really good job of modeling how water is moving in rest of the catchment. If the pump moves the same amount of water within the 10 meter, all of the signal is gone. And same goes for the data about the canals and ditches. We are really grateful to have partners at Lamar University and our co-design team who help us. introduced us to the stakeholders and also we are grateful for the stakeholders to embrace us as researchers and we know that sometimes it appears that we are answering, we are just focused on research but they were still very much engaged in these research questions and guided our research questions so they were meaningful for things they're interested in. So in our case, because one of the domains is Dennis District 7, Cedric Shy (25:35) Mm-hmm. Saubhagya Rathore (25:41) one of the obvious. obvious, let's say, people to interact with were the Dynasty So we some email conversations facilitated by co-design team, where we were able to get some data on ditches, pump stations. And during one of our all hands meeting, we actually were hosted by Dynasty District 7 manager, Alan Sames in their office and we met their engineers, like Baron and... and had a really long and fruitful conversation about anecdotes, where we see flooding, what is the water-like infrastructure, what are the failure points. So instead of modeling every storm, sea, or pipe, we can focus on the failure points and target our models around those. Similarly, Allen Buchanan from BigTicket have been engaging with us and providing some of those initial conversation guiding plans about BigTicket expansion. Cedric Shy (26:23) Mm-hmm. Cedric Shy (26:39) So I was talking to Alan Sims, who's District 7 manager, floodplain manager, and he was saying how he felt so validated by the research because he has been advocating for the Halbootie pump station expansion based on his calculations on the spreadsheet you mentioned. And your modeling is allowing a visual representation and very powerful computational know, measures to show that what he was sort of calculating is actually going to improve the flooding conditions locally. So he's going to be using that to go after FEMA funding. So it's a really powerful story to show, you know, the way the research is making impact locally. Cedric Shy (27:28) Amazing. Christa (27:29) And I will say that stakeholder engagement is really important to be sure that we're asking the right questions to do useful science. It's also, as Sabagi hinted, it's a skill and a discipline in its own right. And it's been really fantastic on this project that we have a team of people who are experts in that space who are covering that work. It can get tricky when sort of individual scientists come through and they don't have the infrastructure to really support the relationships, relationship building over a long term to be sure that their work isn't just extractive. Cedric Shy (28:07) Yeah, definitely takes, it's a heavy lift to step into the stakeholder engagement. It's not just show up and ask questions. So thinking about the future of this work, I know we're coming to a close on our UIFL. I mean, it's been really cool to cross, work with so many different institutions and so many different. disciplines. So what would you guys say the future of this work is? even maybe if this work could be used in Southeast Texas, in Beaumont, what would be your wish for this work to be used, especially in the water team? Saubhagya Rathore (28:39) First of all, will put this as something that is tangible and non-tangible. So, and something that is specific to this region versus something that can be used by broader scientific community, right? Cedric Shy (28:44) Mm-hmm. Saubhagya Rathore (28:53) As Krista mentioned, when we develop these models and put in this modeling framework ATS, now there's a software release from that. So which means it's publicly available. It's community software. So anyone, anywhere in the country, if they want to do similar research, if they want to develop hydrology model and also have these pump stations and gates and all that, they have this capability available because this project delivered it. So it's available to the broader community. Second, We have created for the stakeholders at Vermont and Port Arthur, we have seeded this way of thinking how the scientific process work, how this class of model can inform certain things and the engineering models that they have been using can inform certain things and how they can be used in complementary way. So it's like a... seeding the thought so that future they can continue thinking through these lenses and approach modeling, right? I in a complementary way. And even though this project will conclude. Cedric Shy (29:46) Mm-hmm. Saubhagya Rathore (29:57) our local partners Lamar University and UT Austin is there. I'm sure there'll be future opportunities, which means the foundation that we have built in terms of data, sensor networks, models. I think those can be picked up and continue to develop. continue to provide useful insights. For now, we're focusing on the two scenarios that we discussed because given the time, those were the most important ones. So we'll provide what we learned about the Halbuti expansion and whatever is we think makes sense for being data that we think will be useful for stakeholders. And we'll try to in time get scenario about the ticket expansion. Cedric Shy (30:27) Mm-hmm. thank you all so much for coming in. And the water team has done so many great things for communities. you guys are already, it seems like you're already helping the decision makers make more informed decisions. And maybe and hopefully it would mitigate some flooding and I guess help Southeast Texas continue to be resilient. Thank you guys. Christa (30:56) you Saubhagya Rathore (31:04) Thank you for having me. Christa (31:06) I think ultimately we hope that the work we've done in this time where we got to collaborate with folks in Beaumont and Port Arthur improves people's lives there. Overall, our goal is to do science that serves the public.