SWAT-Related Job Announcements

A fully funded MS/PhD student position in Field and Watershed Scale Modeling is available at the Department of Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering at Michigan State University. The selected student will join the Hydrology and Water Quality Research Group, conducting research on developing and validating models for nutrient fate and transport in agricultural systems, assessing management and conservation practices, and informing nutrient application policies in Michigan. Candidates must have a BS or MS in Hydrology, Agricultural Engineering, Environmental Science/Engineering, or related fields, along with experience in APEX and SWAT+ models, programming in Python and R, and geographic information systems. The position includes a graduate assistantship with full funding and health benefits, with an expectation of high-quality manuscript publications. The student will also conduct fieldwork, including installing automatic water quality samplers and collecting samples.

Interested candidates should contact Dr. Subhasis Giri at girisubh@msu.edu with a CV, list of publications, GRE scores (if available), and TOEFL/IELTS scores (for non-native English speakers). Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis until the position is filled.

Research Project: The Soil & Water Assessment Tool (SWAT+) has been used extensively within the USDA Conservation Effects Assessment Program (CEAP) for evaluating the effectiveness of conservation practices to improve water quality in U.S. watersheds. The National Agroecosystem Model (NAM) is an implementation of SWAT+ for the continental U.S., which considers field-scale hydrologic, nutrient, and plant production processes as well as routing of water and nutrient flows through the national watershed system. A goal of the present opportunity is to evaluate and apply the SWAT+ NAM model to address questions on sustainability of water resources and food production systems across the western United States.

Under the guidance of a mentor, the research objectives for this opportunity include:

• Evaluate and improve model simulations of groundwater recharge and evapotranspiration to facilitate future irrigation and water resource assessments,
• Evaluate options for NAM weather input data and assess its ability for accurate representation of reference evapotranspiration,
• Obtain estimates of actual evapotranspiration and standardized reference evapotranspiration from the OpenET remote sensing platform for evaluation of NAM evapotranspiration simulations at various scales,
• Utilize the SWAT+ water allocation module for evaluating NAM-simulated water transfers and reservoir storage, and
• Evaluate outcomes of water management scenarios for achieving groundwater sustainability in the western United States.