NASA satellite view of clouds over North America

Hydrology & Fluid Dynamics

Duke environmental engineering faculty in the Hydrology and Fluid Dynamics research group pursue some of the most pressing open problems in environmental fluid dynamics, hydrology and water resources. We take a multidisciplinary and multifaceted approach to these complex problems, ranging from advanced theoretical computational analyses to unique laboratory and local and global field experiments.

Falling water droplet

Research Areas

  • Hydrometeorology: Rainfall dynamics, land-atmosphere interaction, remote sensing
  • Eco-hydrology: Impact of hydroclimatic variability on ecosystems and feedbacks on the hydrologic cycle and local climate
  • Contaminant transport hydrology: Surface-subsurface interactions
  • Water cycle dynamics and human health, and stochastic hydrology
Related Study Opportunities

PhD and Master of Science (MS) in Environmental Engineering

Master of Engineering (MEng) in Environmental Engineering

Offers concentrations in:

  • Environmental Engineering and Public Policy
  • Environmental Process Engineering
  • Ecohydrology and Environmental Fluid Dynamics

Undergraduate Research

Primary Faculty

Andrew Bragg

Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Research Interests: Physics and modeling of turbulence and turbulent transport; theoretical and computational fluid dynamics; applied mathematics.

Nathaniel Chaney

Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Research Interests: Hydrology, Earth system science, soil science, ecology, geomorphology, numerical modeling, high performance computing, machine learning, environmental data delivery and data assimilation. 

Akhenaton-Andrew Dhafir Jones

Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Research Interests: Biofilms, cardiovascular infections, infectious diseases, biomaterials, antibiotics, porous media flows, fate and transport of nanomaterials in biofilms, water quality sensors, environmental systems analysis, environmental equity, environmental justice

Zbigniew J. Kabala

Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Research Interests: Dr. Kabala's principal research interests cover stochastic and deterministic theory of fluid flow and contaminant transport in saturated and unsaturated heterogeneous porous media, theory of related measurements, field and laboratory studies in subsurface hydrology, stochastic…

Gabriel G. Katul

George Pearsall Distinguished Professor

Research Interests: Describing the reciprocal influences between the biosphere and the atmosphere are becoming a scientific imperative as human-induced changes in land surface characteristics are impacting the composition of the atmosphere, which in turn is threatening to excite changes in weather…

David E. Schaad

Professor of the Practice of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Research Interests: Sustainable engineering, community development, water and wastewater treatment design, stormwater retention/detention and treatment design, hazardous waste remediation, urban hydrology, constructed wetland and stream restoration design, ecological stabilization, sustainable…

Mark Wiesner

James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Research Interests: Membrane processes, nanostructured materials, transport and fate of nanomaterials in the environment, colloidal and interfacial processes, and environmental systems analysis

Marta Zaniolo

Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Research Interests: Water resources planning and management, drought modeling and control, flexible climate change adaptation, conceptual and data-driven systems modeling, reinforcement learning for water systems, multi-objective control, feature extraction.

Secondary Faculty

James Hench

Associate Professor of Oceanography

Marc A. Jeuland

Professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy

Wenhong Li

Associate Professor of Climate

Ram Oren

Nicholas Distinguished Professor of Earth Systems Science

Adjunct Faculty

Massimo Germano

Adjunct Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Research Interests: Turbulence in fluids and its representation. Multiscale decompositions of turbulent flows. The Navier-Stokes, the Large Eddy and the Reynolds equations. Reynolds modeling and subgrid scale modeling for the Large Eddy Simulation of turbulent flows. Hybrid RANS/LES modeling.

Emeritus Faculty

Miguel A. Medina

Professor Emeritus of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Research Interests: Hydrology; water resources engineering; hydrologic and contaminant transport mathematical modeling; international water resources; stationary and nonstationary time series analysis of extreme precipitation; climate change.