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IGWMC education and outreach manager Lisa Gallagher and project coordinator Tara Kelly worked with Princeton University graduate students to provide local high-school students with an opportunity to think like hydrologists. Students enrolled in week-long environmental science workshops at The Watershed Institute in Pennington, New Jersey, engaged in interactive lessons in which they analyzed and developed geohydrological models that captured the dynamics of groundwater.

IGWMC director Reed Maxwell will lead the Princeton end of a $5 million project funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to simulate the nation’s watershed systems using machine learning and artificial intelligence. The HydroGEN (Hydrologic Scenario Generation) project will put the latest hydrologic science directly into the hands of landscape managers, resource managers and policymakers so they can make informed decisions related to water security and conservation, as well as flood and drought preparedness.

Reed Maxwell was co-corresponding author of a Herculean effort to resolve the discrepancies between two models that capture hydrological processes for the entire United States so that scientists and policymakers can work from consistent, accurate data when managing the nation’s water budget. The project — which was the first model-to-model comparison of this scale — required a year of running supercomputer simulations and analyzing large data sets, as well as comparing the two models to almost 3,000 streamflow observations.

IGWMC director Reed Maxwell is the Princeton lead of a $1 million federally funded project that will use artificial intelligence to simulate the nation’s natural groundwater system in an effort to improve groundwater management, as well as flood and drought preparedness. The project was one of 29 nationwide selected this year for the first phase of the National Science Foundation’s new Convergence Accelerator program.

Reed Maxwell joined Princeton University as a professor of civil and environmental engineering and the High Meadows Environmental Institute (HMEI) and director of the Integrated GroundWater Modeling Center (IGWMC) now based in HMEI. Maxwell, who came to Princeton from the Colorado School of Mines, focuses his research on understanding connections within the hydrologic cycle and how they relate to water quantity and quality under anthropogenic stresses.