CONTINUING FLOOD ANALYSIS WORK ALONG ASIA'S MEKONG RIVER

BY STEPHEN GREENWELL

A professor at the Cullen College of Engineering will continue serving as the lead PI for a NASA project that examines land subsidence, flood forecasting and groundwater management in the Mekong region of Southeast Asia.

Hyongki Lee, Associate Professor of Civil Engineering, has received $692,410 in additional funding for a three-year extension of his research work, “Strengthening Regional and National Capacity for Operational Flood and Drought Management Services for Lower Mekong Nations via Mekong River Commission and SERVIR-Mekong.”

Faisal Hossain, John R. Kiely Endowed Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Washington, and Thanapon Piman, a Senior Research Fellow at the Stockholm Environment Institute, are Lee's co-PIs on the project. Their project was one of 20 chosen, from a field of Step-2 49 proposals.

According to the proposal summary submitted by the group, this builds on research done the past three years, which has resulted in the developed of two systems to monitor flooding in Mekong.

The first tool, the Operational Reservoir Assessment Tool (RAT)-Mekong system, was officially adopted by the Mekong River Commission (MRC) to support their Strategy on Flood Management and Mitigation (FMM) 2021 to 2030 and Drought Management Strategy (DMS) from 2020 to 2025. RAT-Mekong is now operational in MRC’s portal over