ASCE has honored Jorge A. Ramirez, Ph.D., with the 2019 Arid Lands Hydraulic Engineering Award for his exceptional wide-ranging research on arid lands hydrology and hydraulics, including analyzing the vulnerability of the U.S. water supply system to climate change and observationally demonstrating the complementary relationship of evapotranspiration, and for his outstanding teaching and mentoring.
Ramirez’s research activities and contributions have been broad in the fields of hydrology, hydrometeorology, and water resources planning and management. They include such areas as global-scale hydrology and climate change, vulnerability analysis of water resources systems, soil moisture and vegetation interactions, land surface and atmosphere interactions, river basin geomorphology, downstream hydraulic geometry and channel networks, Hortonian overland flow, physically based modeling of evapotranspiration, regional water balance, physically based distributed watershed modeling, hydrologic scaling, and stochastic precipitation modeling.
It is worthy of mention that considerable portions of Ramirez’s research in these areas have been developed and applied toward better understanding the variability of water resources in semiarid and arid regions as well as improving the ensuing planning and management decisions of water resources systems.
The Arid Land Hydraulic Engineering Award is given in recognition of original contributions in hydraulics, hydrology including climatology, planning, irrigation and drainage, hydroelectric power development, or navigation specially applicable to arid or semiarid climates, or contributions to the understanding and development of new technology in river basins.
