Homepage of my HYDROWIT Research Group:
Research Interests
My curiousity about how Mother Nature works never stops. I grew up in a place where asphalt was rather rare while there was plenty of taiga (Webster: tai.ga \ti--ga:\ n [Russ taibreve>ga] : swampy coniferous forest of Siberia beginning where the tundra ends) and water. Ever since then, I love water! Of course, I love taiga full of sounds of billions of mosquitoes and mountains that never lose their snowcaps but that is a different story.
My research interests are in the area of distributed hydrological modeling and vegetation-hydrology interactions. The last few years have been devoted to the development and testing of various hydrological components of the tRIBS model, TIN-based Real-time Integrated Basin Simulator. tRIBS, which represents a joint effort of many people from this lab, is a time-dependent, physically-based, distributed-parameter model for simulating the land phase of the hydrological cycle responding to atmospheric forcing.
Adding a fully dynamic vegetation component, VEGGIE, VEGetation Generator for Interactive Evolution, was one of the corner stones for my Ph.D. work. VEGGIE transformed the tRIBS model into a unique modeling instrument (tRIBS+VEGGIE) that allows one to fully couple the energy, moisture, and carbon cycles in a single framework at a very high level of detail (see the figure on the right). The model features the full coupled canopy and ground surface energy balance, detailed soil moisture dynamics model allowing for the subsurface lateral exchange, and advanced mechanistic description of vegetation processes involving a two-layer photosynthesis model, respiration, allocation, turnover and resources-dependent phenology modules.
My Ph.D. thesis is "Effects of Dynamic Vegetation and Topography on Hydrological Processes in Semi-Arid Areas". This modeling study focuses on vegetation-water-energy dynamics occurring in the complex terrain of a semi-arid area characteristic of central New Mexico. A set of numerical experiments is carried out for two small-scale synthetic domains that exhibit characteristic hillslope curvatures. A weather generator is used to create the long-term series of meteorological forcing. The linkages between terrain attributes and patterns of C4 grass productivity and water balance components are examined for three generic soil types: sand, loam, and clay. An attempt is made to characterize the structure of basin response by studying the spatio-temporal distribution of mean vegetation-hydrology variables averaged over the long-term simulation period. Principal hydrological regimes are identified, which are attributed to the magnitude of lateral water exchange in the domains of study. The analysis reveals that the influences of site-specific and non-local terrain characteristics are superimposed and their combined effect exhibits scaling properties. This allows one to link the characteristic vegetation-hydrology quantities at various landscape locations. Below is an illustration of the simulated patterns of Annual Net Primary Productivity (ANPP) for two selected modeling scenarios. You can access the abstract or full thesis.
Selected Publications
[1] Ivanov, V.Y., Bras, R.L., and Vivoni, E.R. (2008). Vegetation-Hydrology Dynamics in Complex Terrain of Semiarid Areas: I. A mechanistic Approach to Modeling Dynamic Feedbacks, Water Resources Research, 44, W03429, doi:10.1029/2006WR005588.
[2] Ivanov, V.Y., Bras, R.L., and Vivoni, E.R. (2008). Vegetation-Hydrology Dynamics in Complex Terrain of Semiarid Areas: II. Energy-Water Controls of Vegetation Spatio-Temporal Dynamics and Topographic Niches of Favorability, Water Resources Research, 44, W03430, doi:10.1029/2006WR005595.
[3] Ivanov, V.Y., Bras, R.L., and Curtis, D.C. (2007). A weather generator for hydrological, ecological, and agricultural applications, 43, W10406, doi: 10.1029/ 2006WR005364.
[4] Ivanov, V.Y., Vivoni, E.R., Bras, R.L., and Entekhabi, D., (2004). Catchment hydrologic response with a fully-distributed triangulated irregular network model. Water Resources Research, 40(11), W11102, doi:10.1029/2004WR003218.
[5] Ivanov, V.Y., Vivoni, E.R., Bras, R.L., and Entekhabi, D., (2004). Preserving high-resolution surface and rainfall data in operational-scale basin hydrology: a fully-distributed physically-based approach. Journal of Hydrology. 298(1-4): 80-111.
Current Contact Information
Dr. Valeriy Ivanov
University of Michigan
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
1351 Beal Avenue, 105 EWRE
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2125
Phone: (734) 763-5068
Fax: (734) 763-2275
E-mail: ivanov@umich.edu