Prof. James S. Famiglietti Associate Professor of Earth System Science and of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Education and Academic Appointments Prof. Famiglietti holds a B.S. in Geology from Tufts University, an M.S. in Hydrology from the University of Arizona, and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from Princeton University. He completed his postdoctoral studies in hydrology and climate system modeling at Princeton and at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Before joining the faculty at UCI in 2001, Dr. Famiglietti was an Assistant and Associate Professor in the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin, and was the Associate Director of the UT Environmental Science Institute. Research My research concerns the role of hydrology in the coupled Earth system. Areas of current activity include hydrologic and climate system modeling for studies of land-ocean-atmosphere interaction, satellite remote sensing of soil moisture and terrestrial water storage, soil moisture variability and scaling, and global change impacts on water resources and hydrology-vegetation interaction. Click here to learn more about our research activities. Teaching I teach undergraduate and graduate classes in hydrological science from an interdisciplinary Earth system perspective. These include Global Hydrology, Terrestrial Hydrology, Land Interactions, and Land Surface Processes. Go here to learn more about them. Service Major areas of current service are as an editor for Geophysical Research Letters, as co-chair of the AGU Hydrology Section Remote Sensing committee, and as the Graduate Advisor here in ESS. Visit these links to see a list of selected publications, or to learn more about hydrology at UC Irvine.

Group Members I currently supervise a group of 4 doctoral students and one computer programmer. This group includes Dongryeol Ryu, Tajdarul Syed, Gopi Goteti, Ki-Weon Seo (at UT) and Sally Holl. My present and former students come from varied backgrounds, including math, physics, meteorology, geology, environmental science, geography, civil engineering and botany.
	Dongryeol Ryu holds bachelors and masters degrees in geology from Seoul National University in Korea. Dongryeol began his Ph. D. studies at UCI in September, 2001. His dissertation work is addressing soil moisture variability within satellite remote sensing footprints using field observations, aircraft and satellite data, hydrological modeling, and data assimilation.
	Tajdarul Hassan Syed earned his B.Sc. and M. Sc. degrees in Geology from the University of Calcutta, India and a M.S. in Geological Sciences from the University of South Carolina. Hassan joined the ESS department in the Fall, 2002 quarter. His doctoral research focuses on the estimation of the spatio-temporal variability of terrestrial water storage changes for implications in global sea level rise. This will primarily be based on GRACE-derived water storage changes over large spatial scales. Currently he is working on the extension of bias-corrected atmospheric forcing data (ERA40), building on earlier research by former student Aaron Berg.
	Gopi Goteti holds a B.Tech degree in Civil Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, and an M. S. in Civil Engineering from the University of Washington. He began his Ph.D. work in ESS in the Fall, 2003 quarter. Gopi's research will consider the role of continental freshwater outflows on ocean circulation and ocean-atmosphere-land interaction, using Earth system modeling. This research will continue previous work by former students Steve Graham and Marcia Branstetter.
	Ki-Weon Seo earned B. S. and M. S. degrees in Earth Sciences Education from Seoul National University. He began his graduate studies in the Geological Sciences department at the University of Texas at Austin in the Fall, 2000 semester. For his dissertation, Ki-Weon is continuing the work of former student Matt Rodell, using satellite observations of time-variable gravity from the GRACE satellites to monitor changes in terrestrial water storage for large watersheds.
	Sally Holl is our group programmer. She holds an M.S. in Geological Sciences from the University of Texas at Austin and a B.A. in Geology from Oberlin College. She now works on a variety of projects, including soil moisture variability and field experiments and GRACE applications in hydrology.
Follow this link to learn more about my previous graduate students and their current whereabouts.