Water Resources Engineering Research

Professors Wayne Huber and Jack Istok lead water resources research in CCE. Their work is augmented by emeritus faculty members Peter Klingeman and David Bella and instructor Tracy Arras.

Dr. Huber's research interests include urban hydrology, stormwater management, nonpoint source pollution, pollutant transport. He is one of the original authors of the Environmental Protection Agency's Storm Water Management Model (SWMM) and continues to maintain the model engine for the EPA and for the user community. Current information about SWMM may be obtained at the OSU SWMM website.

Dr. Istok research interests include: groundwater hydrology, groundwater quality and remediation, and subsurface fate and transport processes. Dr. Istok designed the large-scale physical aquifer models in the Groundwater Research Laboratory and has developed several novel methods for in situ aquifer characterization. Much of his research focuses on the single-well "push-pull" method, which consists of the controlled injection of a prepared test solution into a single well followed by the extraction of the test solution/groundwater mixture from the same well.

CCEE WRE faculty have traditionally been heavily allied with other water-oriented faculty around the OSU campus, including engineers and scientists in Biological and Ecological Engineering, Forest Engineering, Geosciences, Crop and Soil Science, and elsewhere. The university is widely recognized for its integrative and interdisciplinary activities in water resources. Two cross-campus programs support these interdiscipinary efforts -- the Institute for Water and Watersheds (IWW) provides coordination of water and watershed activities among the 80+ OSU faculty who teach and conduct research in areas related to water and watersheds and the Water Resources Graduate Program (WRGP) allows students to earn interdisciplinary graduate degrees in Water Resources Engineering, Water Resources Science, and Water Resources Policy and Management.

Recent Research Activities

Ongoing research activities change annually depending on faculty interests and sources of support. CCE projects from the period 2000-2005 include:
• Fish passage facilities for dams on the Columbia and Willamette Rivers
• Culvert modifications for fish passage
• Morphology of gravel bed rivers
• Evaluation of best management practices (BMPs) and low-impact development (LID) for highway and urban drainage engineers
• Improvements to the EPA Storm Water Management Model (SWMM), Version 4 and Version 5
• Water quality characteristics of highway construction and repair materials
• Hydrologic investigations at Yucca Mountain, Nevada
• Fate and transport of organic compounds in aquifers
• In situ aquifer characterization methodologies

Photos of Various Water Resources Engineering Research Activities