News Article

Participants in a graduate course supported by CI-WATER and iUTAH are seeing their work being implemented by statewide projects. The course, Hydroinformatics, focuses on the intersection of hydrology, computer science and engineering in the age of big data.

Thirty-three students at three universities—Brigham Young University, the University of Utah and Utah State University—participated in the course, team-taught by faculty at all three institutions. Connected by UEN’s interactive video conferencing system, students and faculty met for inter-campus class sessions with local faculty supervising projects at each institution.

Team projects from the course are designed to aid research into water resources. One project has already been chosen for implementation by iUTAH, an EPSCoR-funded project to help maintain and improve water sustainability in Utah.

Under the guidance of iUTAH postdoctoral researcher Dasch Houdeshel, graduate students Kristianne Sandoval, Lindsay Mink, Nate Moodie and Adam Olsen applied skills learned through the course to improve the flow of data from stormwater drain sensors in the Red Butte Creek watershed to an online data repository for researchers. The project involved setting up hardware and writing computer programs to automate the work path that calls each flow sensor, downloads the data and converts the data from a proprietary format to the appropriate format for the iUTAH data page.

The innovative course, which was piloted in 2012 as the brainchild of USU professor Dr. Jeff Horsburgh, combines the diverse expertise of the team of the professors who teach it: Dr. Horsburgh, Dr. Steve Burian of the UU, and Dr. Dan Ames of BYU.