Date & Time：11:00-12:00, 9th May, 2026
Venue：Lecture Hall 221, SESS, TJU
Speaker：Dr. Shengde Yu, Visiting researcher at the University of Waterloo (Canada)
Abstract: The accelerating construction of dams has outpaced our capacity to model their climate-sensitive behavior at scale. These issues leave feedbacks, such as thermal stratification, oxygen loss, and eutrophication, unresolved. To address this, a comprehensive holistic resource is needed to bring together the variety of interdisciplinary parameters involved. Here we introduce the Global Reservoir Modeling Framework (GRM), which integrates bathymetric (ReGeom), meterological (ERA5), discharge (WaterGAP v2.2d), and inflow (FutureStreams) datasets for 6,824 reservoirs worldwide (GRanD), over a 40 year period (1980-2019). GRM provides reservoir-specific 30 × 30 2-D simulations, that can produce water quality modelling - CE-QUAL-W2 - ready input files, thereby bridging global datasets and multidimensional process models. To demonstrate the utility of the GRM database, we simulate the strengthening of reservoir thermal stratification, driven by decadal trends in air temperature, from 1980 to 2019. Model simulations show global mean surface-to-bottom temperature differences increasing at an average rate of 0.39°C per decade, implying longer hypoxic periods and altered nutrient cycling, with ramifications for reservoir operation and downstream water quality. The GRM database offers an open, reproducible platform that enables large-scale, process-based analyses of reservoir physics and biogeochemistry under past and future climate and management scenarios.
