Fernando Gimeno is a geographer and Master in Environmental Management and Planning at the University of Chile, and a PhD candidate in Natural Resources Sciences at the University of La Frontera. He specialises in watershed-scale water balance models, with a special focus on soil and vegetation variables. He is currently developing his doctoral project ‘Unravelling the effect of soil hydrological properties on catchment hydrologic responses to extreme events’ at the Universidad de la Frontera for the Observatorio de Recursos Hídricos de La Araucanía (Kimün-Ko) in collaboration with the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Can satellites be the key to improve the representation of hydrological processes in regions with scarce information? This is one of the questions that motivates the work to be presented in this session, which addresses the challenges that global change is generating on the basin-scale water balance. These changes are putting increasing pressure on ecosystems and water-dependent societies, requiring urgent adaptations in the face of increasingly variable and uncertain availability.

From southern Chile, a research team is using advanced remote sensing tools and recent satellite data to better understand how global change impacts the water balance and the occurrence of extreme events such as droughts and floods. The aim is to generate robust information to support decision-makers and water managers in designing more effective and sustainable adaptation strategies.

The seminar will take place on Friday, May 16th at 12:00 PM Chile time (4:00 PM UTC) in the Maryam Mirzakhani Room at the Center for Mathematical Modeling, University of Chile (Beauchef 851, North Building, 6th floor). It will also be live-streamed at this link.