Balazs Fekete
Research Scientist III
Balazs joined the Water Systems Analysis Group at its inception.
Scientific Interests
My scientific interests are largely driven by my strong computer skills. Since finishing my M.Sc. I worked on various aspects of data management for hydrological analysis and modeling. I developed highly specialized GIS tools for hydrological applications and worked on software infrastructures to ease the hydrological model development and simplify the interface between models and input data. In my early career I developed an image processing system to process aerial video footage using video frame grabbers. I worked for a GIS company in Hungary and helped with the development of their GIS software. At UNH, I developed a specialized GIS for hydrological applications. This GIS software is part of a larger system called Global Hydrological Archive and Analysis System (GHAAS). While the GHAAS vision turned out to be too ambitious for a single developer (with occasional student help), its 13-year-old design goals, including distributed data access, data format agnostic data management and meta database cataloging, are becoming a reality in OGC standards.
I am particularly interested in the development of modeling frameworks that separate the common modeling tasks (I/O, domain and time management, interfacing between domains, tasks parallelization, etc.) from the science code. I am convinced that future earth system models and applications will need an entirely new data and model architecture that can utilize modern data services (over web interfaces) and distributed computing resources. Such a system will be necessary as the computational demand continues to grow as a result of operating models and applications at increasingly high spatial and temporal resolutions. The implementation of the new data and model architecture to utilize distributed computing and data resources will require professional computer scientists since the amount of computer science knowledge far exceeds what earth system scientists can acquire on their own while maintaining knowledge in their own fields. On the other hand, such development has to be guided by earth system scientists with strong computer skills who can translate the scientific requirements to software development tasks.
Considering existing modeling frameworks, one has to conclude that the science code has two major components. The first is a set of modules implementing the various physical processes (e.g. evaporation, infiltration, groundwater recharge, base flow, surface flow, etc.) and the second is an overall model structure which specifies the linkages between domains (e.g. land-surface, river network, groundwater, etc. for a hydrological model) and the interaction between modules. The UNH team has developed two experimental modeling infrastructures over the years as part of the GHAAS system that shows the potential of developing a model in unified modeling frameworks. Recent collaboration with the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) to contribute biogeochemical processing capabilities to their earth system model allowed access to an entirely different modeling framework.
In addition to the computer infrastructure, my hydrological research tends to focus on physical processes including riverine flow, channel formation and hydrological data assimilations to incorporate discharge observations into river routing schemes as a means of providing the most accurate estimate of river discharge at any location. I have a special interest in stable isotope (deuterium and 18O) processes in the hydrological cycle. The stable isotope response in hydrological processes are often very different from the water and energy balance and provide a different perspective to the hydrological cycle. A recently evolving opportunity to estimate the stable isotopic composition of the precipitation from the Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer (TES) onboard the Aura satellite potentially makes the application of stable isotopes at the large scale feasible.
Computer Skills
- Programming in C/C++
- FORTRAN77 and FORTRAN90
- R statistical language
- various UNIX shells primarily in bash
- SQL (ORACLE and MySQL)
- ARC/INFO (since 1992)
- UNIX (Ultrix, OSF, SunOS, Solaris, IRIX, AIX, HPUX, Xenix, SCO Unix)
- X Window (since 1989)
- Motif (since 1992)
- Linux (RedHat, Debian, Ubuntu)
- user and administrator (since 1994)
- MacOS X (since 2001)
- cluster computing with MPI.
Curriculum Vitae
A pdf version of Balazs' curriculum vitae is available here.
Recent Publications
Fekete, B.M., J.J. Gibson, P. Aggarwal, C.J. Vörösmarty (2006): Application of Isotope Tracers in Continental Scale Hydrological Modeling. Journal of Hydrology, 330, pp 444-456.
Federer, C.A., C.J. Vörösmarty, B.M. Fekete (1996): Intercomparison of methods for calculating potential evaporation in regional and global water balance models, Water Resource Research, 32(7):2315-2321.
Koster, R. D., B. M. Fekete, G. J. Huffman and P. W. Stackhouse Jr.: Revisiting a Hydrological Analysis Framework with ISLSCP-2 Rainfall, Net Radiation, and Runoff Fields, Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol. 111, D22S05, doi:10.1029/2006JD007182, 2006.
Fekete, B.M. C.J. Vörösmarty, J. Roads, C. Willmott (2004): Uncertainties in Precipitation and their Impacts on Runoff Estimates, Journal of Climate, 17(1), 294-303.
Fekete, B.M., C.J. Vörösmarty and W. Grabs (2002): High Resolution Fields of Global Runoff Combining Observed River Discharge and Simulated Water Balances, Global Biogeochemical Cycles. 16(3), 15 1-6.
Fekete, B.M., C.J. Vörösmarty, and R.B. Lammers (2001). Scaling gridded river networks for macroscale hydrology: Development, analysis and control of error. Water Resources Research 37(7): 1955-1967.
Lammers, R.B., A.I. Shiklomanov, C.J. Vörösmarty, B.M. Fekete, and B.J. Peterson (2001). Assessment of contemporary Arctic river runoff based on observational discharge records. JGR-Atmospheres, 106(D4): 3321-3334.
Vörösmarty, C.J., B.M. Fekete, M. Meybeck, and R. Lammers (2000). Geomorphometric characteristics of a simulated topological network for world rivers at 30-minute spatial resolution (STN-30). J. Hydrology 237: 17-39.
Vörösmarty, C.J., B.M. Fekete, M. Meybeck and R.B. Lammers (2000). Global system of rivers: Its role in organizing continental land mass and defining land-to-ocean linkages. Global Biogeochemical Cycles 14(2): 599-621.