Friday, April 8, 2016
3:00 pm in The Banquet Room at Owens Hall
Presented by Dr. Rafael L. Bras, Sc.D.
Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs
Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering and School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
K. Harrison Brown Family Chair
Georgia Institute of Technology
The hydrologic cycle is an exquisitely coordinated, balanced, interaction between the atmosphere, the oceans, and the land. The system is incredibly complex and non-linear, with a myriad of positive and negative feedbacks acting at a variety of scales; and all occurring within a highly variable environment that can only be described as random. Hence, the hydrologic states resulting from this complexity are a unique product of both chance and necessity. This talk explores some outcomes of hydrologic complexity, chance and necessity with several examples. Examples include the surprising predictability of land fluxes from maximum entropy production principles; the impact of deforestation on the Amazon cloud climate; the self-organization of landscapes and river basins over very long time periods and the role of vegetation on landscape evolution; and the role of erosion and deposition in the carbon balance of a watershed.
The G.V. Loganathan Distinguished Lecture Series was established to honor the contributions of scholarship, instruction and service by Dr. G.V. Loganathan in the area of water resources engineering and in memory of Dr. Loganathan and his students of the Advanced Hydrology class, 2007.
G.V. Loganathan was an internationally renowned researcher in the field of engineering hydrology and water resources systems. G.V. joined the Virginia Tech faculty in 1982 after completing his Ph.D. degree from the School of Civil Engineering at Purdue University. G.V. wrote more than 150 peer-reviewed academic publications on a variety of topics including urban stormwater hydrology, drought modeling and low-flow analysis, optimization and decision analysis and drinkingwater infrastructure. He received the ASCE Wesley W. Horner Best Paper Award in 1996. He was named the Outstanding Civil Engineer of the Year by the Virginia Section of the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2007.
G.V. was the five-time recipient of the CEE Faculty Achievement Award; an annual award determined by the CEE student body. He was dedicated to his students; both undergraduate and graduate students. G.V directed 42 graduate students including 8 Ph.D. dissertations.