On the Horizon: Celebrating 10 Years of the National Water Center Innovators Program Summer Institute
Posted Oct 9, 2024
Photo credit: Betsy Morrison
Emily Clark, Project Manager, CUAHSI
The year may not be over, but we’re already looking ahead to an exciting milestone: 2025 will mark the 10-year anniversary of the The National Water Center Innovators Program Summer Institute. Since its launch in 2015, the SI has brought together over 200 graduate student fellows from nearly 100 universities to collaborate on cutting-edge research in water prediction and flood forecasting. CUAHSI has been a partner since the beginning! Beyond the research, the SI also builds lasting professional networks that continue to drive innovation in water science.
Planning is already underway for the 2025 SI. The call for 2025 Theme Leaders is now open on our website, and student applications will open later this fall!
We’ll also be planning special programming to celebrate this exciting milestone. SI alumni, please reach out to Julia Masterman (email hidden; JavaScript is required) for updates on 10-year anniversary alumni opportunities.
2024 Program Highlights:
A collaboration between the National Weather Service’s Office of Water Prediction (OWP), CUAHSI, and the University of Alabama, the SI is a seven-week experiential learning program that brings graduate students together with academic researchers, industry professionals, and National Water Center (NWC) staff to tackle projects related to water prediction and flood forecasting.
In 2024, 24 graduate student fellows from 14 different US universities participated in the program, held from June 9 - July 26, 2024 at the University of Alabama. Students formed teams and worked on projects under the following themes:
Assimilation of Geosynchronous Satellite Imagery into NextGen for Improved Modeling, led by Jonathan Frame (University of Alabama)
Flood Inundation Mapping (FIM) Uncertainty Analysis and Model Intercomparison, led by Xingong Li (Kansas University) and Sagy Cohen (University of Alabama)
Geospatial Data Integration to Identify High-flow Thresholds for Improved Flood Risk Characterization, led by Kelsey R. McDonough (FloodMapp) and Sanjib Sharma (Howard University).
Student Course Coordinators and SI alumni Karina Larco (Brigham Young University) and Sadaf Mahmoudi (University of Alabama) provided invaluable onsite guidance and leadership to support the student project teams.
The program began with a two-week ‘Bootcamp’’ that provided fellows with training in coding, data science best practices, data processing, modeling workflows, and project management, followed by four weeks of focused research. The program culminated in a Capstone meeting where the fellows presented their research findings, which were also summarized in a final report.
Funding for the SI is provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), awarded to the Cooperative Institute for Research on Hydrology (CIROH) through the NOAA Cooperative Agreement with The University of Alabama, NA22NWS4320003.