News and Highlights

Check out Utah Public Radio's Access Utah program "talking water," hosting iUTAH's David Rosenberg and Joanna Endter-Wada. Living in the second-driest state in the U.S., most of us are closely attuned to water issues as we face changes to our climate. 

Read the new February 2014 iUTAH Newsletter. Just released.

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.

Proposals to present posters or talks are now being accepted for the Tenth Annual Utah State University (USU) Water Initiative Spring Runoff Conference. The conference, which is slated for April 1–2 at the USU Eccles Conference Center, provides a forum for interdisciplinary sharing and exchange of ideas on water-related issues in Utah and the Intermountain Region extending to all aspects of water science, policy, engineering and management.

The deadline for abstracts is March 3, 2014. Students are strongly encouraged to apply and attend. The conference typically has about 150 participants from regional universities, state and federal agencies and invited national and international speakers. This year’s conference will feature a screening of "Last Call at the Oasis", a documentary about the global water crisis.

The USU Water Initiative is an interdisciplinary collaboration across Utah State University established to foster collegial sharing of water-related research and ideas throughout the campus and community.

Read the new January 2014 iUTAH Newsletter. Just released.

The 82nd annual Western Snow Conference will be held April 14-17, 2014 at the beautiful and historic Strater Hotel, in Durango, Colorado.