EACE E3250: Hydrosystems Engineering

Course Overview

Hydrosystem Engineering is a quantitative introduction to the water cycle and associated mass transport for water resources and environmental engineering. 

The course is divided into three core sections: Surface-Atmosphere Water and Energy Exchange, Surface-Subsurface Water Movement, and Tools for Hydrosystems Engineering. You’ll explore key hydrologic processes such as precipitation, evaporation, infiltration, runoff, and subsurface flow. Emphasis is placed on understanding both the physical mechanisms and the theoretical and numerical tools used to analyze hydrologic systems. By the end of the course, you will have a solid understanding of the fundamental principles of hydrology and their application to real-world engineering problems. You’ll be equipped with the critical skills to examine hydrologic phenomena using scientific reasoning and practical engineering approaches.

Course Instructor

Shaina Kelly

Assistant Professor of Earth and Environmental Engineering

Shaina Kelly is an Assistant Professor of Earth and Environmental Engineering at Columbia University and the Assistant Director of Columbia’s Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy. Shaina joined Columbia in July 2022, following 6 years of industry experience, primarily as a Senior Petrophysicist at ConocoPhillips Company. Shaina and her team specialize in the integration of pore- to core-scale sample analyses techniques, microscopy, micro/nanofluidics, and computational fluid dynamics methods to identify emergent transport phenomena and properties in nanoporous and dual-porosity (unconventional) rocks. 

This background is particularly relevant to the groundwater hydrology, snowmelt, and soil infiltration chapters of the Hydrosystems Engineering course, which study the flow of water in environmental porous media (soils and rocks).

Lab website: https://kellylab.engineering.columbia.edu/