Sungyoon participated in the 2018 WRF-Hydro Workshop at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). It was 3.5 day training workshop on the WRF-Hydro Modeling System. He learned how to set up, run, and calibrate the WRF-Hydro Model and how to implement the existing dams in the WRF-Hydro model. These techniques will help him to investigate the impact of dams and reservoirs on water resources in the southeastern U.S. region.

The UA Natural Disaster Research Team (Drs. Dao, Moftakhari, Kim, and Kam) visited Panama City and Mexico Beach to collect the data for damage assessment and river bathymetry survey. We also sampled water from Apalachicola River (October 22, 2018) during the river bathymetric surveys. Drs. Elliott and Terry's labs  analyzed the water sample. During this trip, we named our underwater drone "Tooah" after Alabama QB, "Tua Tagovailoa.  Please watch the videos and photos from our trip! Panama City and Mexico Beach were not describe.

Dr. Kam was invited for an oral presentation at the 99th AMS Annual Meeting in Phoenix, AZ. The presentation is about the social dynamics during the 2011-17 California Drought using Google Trends. The key findings of this study includes: 1) there is a big gap between drought risk and drought awareness during the onset of the drought, 2) the key determinants of the peak of drought awareness are various from natural factors (radical changes in drought risk) to human factors (governor's actions and forecasts on a strong El-Nino winter of 2015), and 3) The fitted power-law decay model with auto-correlation against the Google Trends data succeeded to characterize the decay patterns of drought awareness. Please come to see Dr. Kam's presentation if you are coming to the AMS annual meeting this year. (Link)