GCC Affiliate Cayelan Carey to Expand Modeling Capabilities for Daily Water Quantity and Quality Forecasts

For years, water managers have used historical baselines to predict changes in water quality and quantity in lakes and reservoirs. If a big storm or drought were to hit in weeks to come, they could look back at the ebbs and flows in water conditions that came with past storms and droughts. But climate change has thrown a wrench in that once reliable, longtime strategy, says Cayelan Carey, a freshwater scientist and professor of biological sciences at Virginia Tech. According to Carey, the once-reliable historical guidelines for conditions such as water temperature and oxygen are becoming less dependable. “There’s a much larger envelope of what the possible conditions are now versus what they were in the past,” she said. Carey hopes to offer water managers a data-driven alternative. As a Fulbright Future Scholar, she traveled to Australia, earlier this year to work in collaboration with Matthew Hipsey of the University of Western Australia on a water quality and quantity forecasting system developed by Carey and GCC affiliate Quinn Thomas, an associate professor in the VT College of Natural Resources and Environment and a Data Science Faculty Fellow in the College of Science.

Study by GCC Affiliate Alasdair Cohen Finds Potentially Dangerous Levels of Arsenic in Calif. Prison Drinking Water

Ten years after the state of California recognized the human right to water, hundreds of thousands of residents still rely on drinking water that contains dangerous levels of contaminants, including the highly toxic mineral arsenic. Many of them live in low-income and rural communities that struggle to afford the necessary infrastructure to remove arsenic from drinking water. A new study, published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives and led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and Virginia Tech, is one of the first to analyze how incarcerated individuals in California may be impacted by arsenic-contaminated water. “We conducted this study, in part, to try and better understand how disaggregated water quality data could be used to identify potential historic exposures to drinking water contaminants among incarcerated and non-incarcerated populations sharing similar groundwater,” said study senior author Alasdair Cohen, an assistant professor of environmental epidemiology in the Department of Population Health Sciences.