Large Scale Simulation of Water and Contaminants in the Great Lakes

Dr. Mantha Phanikumar is a Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. His research uses the computational resources of the HPCC to develop models of water quality and quantity in the Great Lakes region. Dr. Phanikumar’s 3D models use millions of grid points with resolution between 10-100 meters in the horizontal direction. The variable grid size allows Dr. Phanikumar to have fine meshes at the beach level, where more detail is needed, and larger meshes (typically a kilometer or more) in the middle of the Lakes, where less detail is needed.

Modeling these water regions is no easy task, in part because there is no known set of simple variables to accurately predict events, such as the path contaminates take after an accidental spill. Such problems are extremely complex and require modeling at many scales – from the planetary scale of the Earth’s rotation to regional weather patterns and small-scale models of individual beaches, including the location, amount and type of contamination. No single process or theoretical model currently exists to combine these types of data from different modeling scales.

Although Dr. Phanikumar would like to model every detail, down to the migration of sand in the dunes, that is not currently feasible – the trick is figuring out where compromises can be made to develop models that are accurate enough to be of value. His current efforts focus on isolating the specific environmental variables and processes that can be used to predict the levels of pathogens, such as bacteria viruses and protozoa, with the goal of creating a prediction model that will help protect the public from contaminated waterways.

More details of this computational research based on HPCC facilities are available in the following papers:

1. P. Thupaki, M.S. Phanikumar, D. Beletsky, D.J. Schwab, M.B. Nevers and R.L. Whitman, Budget Analysis of Escherichia coli at a Southern Lake Michigan Beach, Environmental Science & Technology, vol. 44, no. 3, pp. 1010-1016, doi: 10.1021/es0902232a (2010)

2. C. Shen, M.S. Phanikumar, T.T. Fong, I. Aslam, S.L. Molloy and J.B. Rose, Evaluating Bacteriophage P22 as a Tracer in a Complex Surface Water System: The Grand River, Michigan, Environmental Science & Technology , Vol. 42, No. 7, pp. 2426 – 2431, doi: 10.1021/es02317t (2008)

3. L. Liu, M.S. Phanikumar, S.L. Molloy, R.L. Whitman, M.B. Nevers, D.A. Shively, D.J. Schwab, J.B. Rose, Modeling the Transport and Inactivation of E. coli and Enterococci in the Nearshore Region of Lake Michigan, Environmental Science & Technology , Vol. 40, No. 16, pp. 5022-5028, doi: 10.1021/es060438k (2006)