Water Resources Group

A team of UCLA students won first place in the demonstration project category for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s eighth annual Campus RainWorks Challenge, a national competition that engages college students in the design of on-campus green infrastructure solutions to help address stormwater pollution.  The team’s project, “Little Steps to a Sustainable Future,” redesigned a...

During the 2017-2018 school year, the Graduate Student Water Resources Group (GSWRG) put on three well-attended seminars, featuring water experts discussing water conservation, sustainable groundwater management plans and stormwater management in Los Angeles County. In the spring, the 2017/2018 co-chairs recruited new co-chairs for 2018-2019. Six graduate students from five different graduate programs at UCLA...

"You see a storm year like [2016] and you see all the water that ends up going through the L.A. River and Ballona Creek and Dominguez Channel, and you say, 'Wow. That could have been our water supply for the next year,'" said Mark Gold of the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability.

A study led by UCLA IoES Center for Climate Science postdoc Xingying Huang finds that climate change has already contributed to greater wintertime runoff in the Sierra Nevada, and that flood risk climbs in the future. "Our big dams were designed to capture smaller floods than what we expect in the future," said colleague Daniel Swain in Weather Channel. "...these structures were built for a climate that we no longer have."

This year, the GSWRG is disseminating information about the upcoming World Water Forum College Grant Program, which is administered by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. (MWD)  Additional sponsors are the US Department of the Interior, Bureau of Reclamation, The Sanitation Districts of Los Angeles County and Water for People. $10,000 competitive grants are...