FHR Lab

Flood Hazards Research Lab

The Flood Hazards Research Lab at the Sid and Reva Dewberry Department of Civil, Environmental and Infrastructure Engineering is dedicated to research sustainable solutions to flood hazards impacting societies in coastal, riverine and urban environments.

Our work combines field investigations and measurements of flood hazards to computational models development and applications. Our group has experience in deployment field instrumentation under extreme events conditions and we are currently working on developing real time systems for flood hazards awareness.

 

Facilities, Computational Resources and Field Equipment

Facilities

We are located at the Volgenau School of Engineering Nguyen Building, Office # 1414. See link for map and campus parking instructions.

 

 

 

 

 

Computational Resources

Our Lab has a proven track record in competing for and utilizing large (on the order 1 million CPU hours per year) High Performance Computing (HPC) allocations from the XSEDE/NSF facilities. We are currently utilizing could computing resources from both the Amazon EC2  and Microsoft Azure. In addition to HPC and cloud computing resources, our Lab has 6 workstations and several field Laptops. Our Lab also has a dedicated 12TB of dedicated storage in the VSE datacenter.  Furthermore, we continuously utilize the GMU Office of Research Computing Argo Research Cluster, which consists of several compute and "fat" compute nodes, all with 8-core CPUs running a typical software stack based on RHEL-6 suitable for numerical experimentation and data analysis. 

 

Hydrodynamic field monitoring

We specialize in monitoring hydrodynamic conditions in estuaries, urban and suburban streams. Our equipment range from pressure transducers for water level and wave characteristics monitoring to ADCPs for current profiles.

  • 2 Aquadopps by Nortek (ADCP)
  • 1 RiverIQ by Sontek (ADCP)
  • 30 HOBO pressure transducers by ONSET for water level measurements
  • 6 Trueblue pressure transducers for wave measurements
  • 1 real time pressure transducer for water level measurements from Campbell Scientific
  • 1 Flowmeter, wadding rod and Aquacount by Rickly  
  • 1 Radar water level sensor from Campbell Scientific

 

Hydrologic field monitoring

We currently operate a mobile real time weather station to monitor extreme weather as well as a suite of stand-alone environmental monitoring stations.

  • Real time weather station (Temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and direction, barometric pressure) by ONSET
  • 5 stand-alone rain gages by ONSET

 

 

 

 

Surveying equipment

Our surveying equipment is dedicated to perform detailed topo/bathymetric measurements of our study sites.

  • Trimble R4 Base and Rover System
  • Handheld GPS

 

 

 

Multimedia equipment

Our multimedia equipment selection is dedicated to document flood hazards events and physical process related to our research project, field work and extreme events monitoring.

  • 4 GoPro Hero cameras
  • 5 Bushnell cameras
  • 1 Microseven Wireless monitoring camera