Carly H Hansen

Bio

Carly Hansen works in the Water Resources Science and Engineering Group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Prior to coming to ORNL, she was a postdoctoral researcher and instructor at the University of Utah. She helped develop a systems dynamic model for an urban river basin to explore complex interactions between snowmelt-driven reservoir systems, changing climate conditions, urban water use, and lake water quality. She received her PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of Utah where she used a variety of remote sensing, statistical analyses, and hydroinformatics tools to evaluate trends and driving factors relevant to short-term monitoring of algal blooms. 

At ORNL, Carly uses her background to explore links between built/natural hydrology and hydropower systems. Recent areas of focus include:

• assessing data quality and national-scale data improvement needs for dams and reservoirs
• classifying non-powered dams and retrofits of non-powered dams and supporting the development of tools that facilitate exploration of dam data
• quantifying storage and evaluating flexibility of reservoir storage at existing hydropower reservoirs
• exploring hydroclimate, morphology, water quality, and operational decisions that influence greenhouse gas emissions