Hydroinformatics is concerned with the development and application of mathematical modelling and advanced information technology tools to hydraulics, hydrological and environmental problems of urban, inland and coastal waters. On the technical side, in addition to computational hydraulics, Hydroinformatics has a strong interest in the use of techniques originating in data-driven techniques, such as artificial neural networks, support vector machines and evolutionary programming.

This course introduces fundamental mathematical and physical elements of the Earth climate with specific focus on clouds, precipitation, energy budget, planetary boundary layer and extreme weather phenomena. This knowledge is relevant for a better assessment of water and energy resources and impact assessments. Beyond introducing fundamental climatic processes, the course provides methods for the stochastic generation of climatic variables in a stationary and changing climate. It finally discusses broadly issues related to greenhouses gas emissions and future climate projections, outlining causes and potential solutions.

Students will be introduced to the basic issues of collecting and using data as applied to urban hydraulic and hydrological systems. Topics to be covered will include data, data collection and internet of things (IOT), data storage, meta-data, and an introduction to Geographical Information Systems, and data visualization. Students will work on a project utilizing an actual instrumented catchment to appreciate the practical issues.

By the end students should appreciate the issues related to capturing and visualizing hydraulic related data for smart cities.

This course introduces CE students to practical issues in the process from data collection to modelling rainfall to runoff. The focus will be on urban environments where the impact of flooding is magnified due to high population density. Students will collect, clean and use data to setup and run a basic catchment rainfall-runoff model.

The understanding gained will provide students with a greater appreciation in the methodology used to translate fundamental knowledge to practical real-world situations specifically floods in an urban catchment.

This course introduces the basic principles to the numerical methods used for analysis of mechanics and environmental flow problems. Fundamental concepts in finite difference method, and the associated convergence and stability issues will be covered.

The concepts of grids, issues with them and possible solution methods will be discussed. The course will enable the students to acquire the basic numerical analysis knowledge and computational skills through mini-projects and homework assignments.

This course builds on the fundamental concepts of numerical methods introduced in CE6077A and applies it to the transport processes of environmental systems such as the atmosphere, freshwater systems, estuaries, coastal seas and oceans. The focus will be on how numerical methods impact solutions due to the fundamental transport equations.

The course will equip students to understand the importance of transport processes to environmental impacts, limitations of computer/mathematical models to solve the transport processes and how to obtain relevant solutions given the limitations of the models.