00:00:08 Mae Macfarlane
Hi, I'm Mae MacFarlane here with the Professor Podcast, the podcast of your professors, their research and their academic lives here at St. Thomas
This week, we are delighted to have with us Dr Mohsen Tomasebi Nasab, a professor in the St. Thomas School of Engineering, in the Department of Civil Engineering.
Welcome, Mohsen.
00:00:27 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
Glad to be here. Thanks for having me.
00:00:29 Mae Macfarlane
So, kind of to kick off, can you briefly describe what your general research is about or what your specialty is?
00:00:38 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
So I have a PhD in civil engineering, but civil engineering as you may know, can be divided into different branches, different specialties, right?
One of those is water resources engineering, and then when you go deeper into water resources engineering, there are different branches again. Hydrology is one of them.
And I know that your next question is going to be “what is hydrology?” probably. So, let me answer that question for you.
Hydrology is the study of distribution and movement of water on and below the surface of the Earth.
So, think about rainfall and how it falls down on the earth surface and how it runs off and how it infiltrates into the soil, goes to the groundwater, goes back to the stream and river, and evaporates, and becomes rainfall again.
Essentially the water cycle, right? We call this the water cycle. There's a fancier name for that, which is the hydrologic cycle.
So, what I do is to study this hydrologic cycle and use computer models and use mathematical equations to make sense of everything that is going on and to be able to estimate the quantity of water. Sometimes the quality of the water and how it flows in different systems: surface and subsurface.
00:01:58 Mae Macfarlane
So it's kind of like a niche section of the broad spectrum of civil engineering.
How did you choose that section and the hydrology in … specifically?
00:02:10 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
That's a great question.
So, as I was doing my middle school and some parts of high school, I used to live in Russia.
And there is a river passing through the city of Moscow called Muskwa River or River of Moscow. And as someone in middle school, I was amazed by how big this river is and where this water is coming from, and how it's formed, how it freezes and then thaws.
All these hydrologic processes that goes through a water, our water system, right? So I wanted to learn more about this. So, I decided to do my undergraduate degree in Water Resources Engineering. And then for my Master's degree and PhD I started to focus specifically on hydraulics which is the engineering and study of moving water and hydrology, which is the study of distribution and movement of water.
00:03:01 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
So, this is the longer version of why? Why I got interested in water resources engineering. Over the years I have become more and more interested to learn more about water resources engineering and hydrology because I have lived in different countries. And I have different mentors. And I have learned a lot from them. And I have learned that there is a global scale of problems that water resources engineers face. And how to be able to solve these problems requires a holistic approach, and this is what I'm trying to achieve and this is what I'm trying to tell my students and my advisees as well.
00:03:38 Mae Macfarlane
What would an example of that kind of water situations be like here in Minnesota, as we do have a lot of a lot of water here. And St Thomas is located right on the Mississippi.
So like what does that role play in your teaching and your research?
00:03:53 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
That's a good question.
OK, so, if you ask someone who lives in Florida to describe the hydrologic cycle, the water cycle for you, their answer is going to be slightly different from someone who lives in Minnesota, right?
As you mentioned, we have snow over here, snow melt. We have snow accumulation and then we have frozen ground. So, this plays a big role in the type of research that hydrologists do.
For example, if you are developing a computer model, you need to make sure that that computer model is specifically developed for the purpose of your research. My research is about cold climates, so the hydrologic models that I develop are going to focus on the cold climate processes such as snow accumulation, snow melt and frozen ground.
00:04:36 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
This will help you to regionalize these hydrologic models and come up with more accurate results, more accurate estimations specifically on the regions of interest.
There is a great point that we should all pay attention to. The hydrologic model that performs perfect in a region like Minnesota, called Climate Region, might not perform good in a region like Florida, right, because it was not developed for that area.
So there is a great deal of calibration and validation going on for hydrologic models to make sure that the results that we get are not just computer game results. They are meaningful, right? We can do something with them.
And to complement that, we usually pair these computer generated results with some field measurements to make sure that the we can verify or validate the validity of our simulation.
00:05:31 Mae Macfarlane
And how do those computer models enhance this research instead of just doing like field testing and quantifying what you get in the field?
00:05:40 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
Let's have a let's have an example, a hypothetical example.
Let's say that we live in somewhere in Minnesota. Actually, let's say that we're living in the Twin Cities area, right? And if I set up a temperature sensor right in downtown Minneapolis that's going to read an air temperature of something.
Let's say right now 85 degrees Fahrenheit, right? If you go outside of the cities, for example, and set another sensor there, that temperature is gonna be higher or lower depending on different weather conditions, right?
OK, so practically, how many of these sensors can be installed over the entire country. Right, the number is limited. We cannot have so many sensors that covers every single point or city or rural area in the country, right?
So, the importance of the hydrologic model is that it allows you to simulate your results. It could be temperature, rainfall, surface runoff, groundwater at any given point that you want. OK, so you're not bound to your physical sensors.
You can write a couple of lines of codes -- and sometimes it's more than a couple of lines of codes -- and train your model for a similar station data that you have. And then your model will be able to give you results for a point that you do not have measured data for, right?
00:07:03 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
So that's the value of hydrologic modeling. My example was about air temperature. Now you can extend this to different measurements. For example, a river station measures the flow of water that goes through the river, in the Twin Cities area the Mississippi River, right? We have only a handful of stations in Twin Cities metropolitan area.
What if I want to measure the flow of water in between these two stations, right? What do I do? Then I need to have a hydrologic model. I need to calibrate it using the known stations first, and then use that hydrologic model to estimate the value at the point that I do not have observed data for.
This is the power of hydrologic models.
This example that I gave you only told you about the estimation power of hydrologic models. They also can predict for you. Let's say that you have some climate data predicted climate data. You want to know that based on this predicted temperature and predicted rainfall in future, what would be the amount -- or I should say the quantity of water -- in Mississippi River?
You can also use those types of hydrologic models for prediction.
00:08:14 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
So, think about it, hydrologic models are just magical. You put some data into it, you calibrate it based on the data that you have, and then they will be able to give you accurate estimation, and sometimes prediction, of different hydrologic processes such as snow melt, stream flow, and so on and so forth.
00:08:32 Mae Macfarlane
So kind of taking that data and the predictions and every projections and everything. How does that kind of play in it to like an average person's life? Like where do we consume that information?
How does it affect -- also, I guess two-part question, the civil engineering of it, how does it affect the everyday person?
00:08:52 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
Mae I'm just impressed by all these questions. These are very, very good questions.
First, yes, these are awesome.
Yes, let's simplify them first and then we will scale it up.
00:09:02 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
Let's say that you are designing a parking lot, right? A parking lot is a very common structure that we make in cities, right? One of the ... if I ask you, what does a parking lot look like, you're gonna tell me it's a paved area, you park your car in it, and there is a surface drain that collects all the stormwater that is collected in that parking area, right?
But now I want you to think about it from a hydrologist perspective. A hydrologist wants to know how much water is going to flow into that drain in that parking lot, right. Because we do not want our parking lot to be flooded, obviously.
00:09:36 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
So, a hydrologist ... you asked me how we can use this in our everyday life, right?
So a hydrologist is going to use mathematical equations, and sometimes computer models to figure out what kind of rainfall should I use to design the flow rate that goes into the surface drain in that parking lot.
Do I need to use the rainfall that I had last week? The value for that rainfall? Or do I need to use the intensity of the average rainfalls over a year or do I need to use the average intensity of rainfalls in the last 30 years and so on and so forth.
These are the decisions that a hydrologist makes to give you one number, or in other words, to give people who are designing that parking lot one number. And that number is the maximum amount of flow that goes into that drain in the parking lot.
00:10:26 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
This was a very tangible example, but to make it even better and easier to understand, let's say that you just bought a house right in the Twin Cities area.
Now you are going to put a rain barrel next to your house. You collect the amount of rain that falls on top of your house. It's a very good practice because you can save the water and then irrigate your lawn or your backyard/your front yard using the rainwater right?
So how do we find that flow that goes into the rain barrel? That's the job of the hydrologist.
So just they're going to analyze the rainfall. They're going to figure out, based on the area off the rooftop that you have, how much water goes into the rain barrel. And they're going to eventually size that rain barrel so, it's not going to get filled after one teeny tiny rainfall. It will be … it will have some water in it in a longer period of time.
OK, so these were smaller examples right? Now, let's scale this up, scale it up to a county scale or state scale or country scale. The hydrologist job is to figure out how much water you're going to end up having on surface of the ground.
00:11:31 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
Now in our groundwater, how much water is going to be saved in the soil that can be used by plants, right? Minnesota is an agricultural state, so it is important to figure out how much water is in the soil during the year. Specifically, for example, when you are growing different crops.
00:11:50 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
So they started from a very, very small scale to a very large scale.
Obviously when you are doing your design for your house, you probably do not need a computer model to help you to do that calculations because the equations that you're going to use are not that complicated, right?
But as you are moving higher and higher in scale, and scale gets bigger and bigger, you need to use some type of help from computers to do all these calculations, Iterative calculations for you.
00:12:18 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
OK, I wanted to add actually another point to it, but I will wait for your question.
00:12:25 Mae Macfarlane
OK. Yeah, those are all very, like, tangible, easy-to-understand answers.
And so looking back at my St. Thomas education, I took an intro to environmental science course with Dr. Lisa Lamb and Dr. Chip Small. And our research was on the city of Woodbury. And they have an excessive amount of drainage ponds, the groundwater ponds. And so does hydrology … or maybe this might be more geography-related ... geology-related Where to place those? How to build houses around it?
Is that civil engineering or city planning? Like or all of it together? Thinking about how it applies to the city and planning.
00:13:07 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
Different disciplines have become very intertwined. So there are different things that environmental engineers do and then water resources engineers do, and environmental scientists do that basically overlap each other, right? So, I do not want to say that this is specifically a civil engineer's job. Or an environmental scientist job.
00:13:30 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
But civil engineers today are doing things that 20 years ago -- it was out of question, right? Today, civil engineers, water resources engineers are analyzing satellite imagery to figure out how the surface of water changes over time, right?
But 20 years ago, this was a new topic. Right now, it's so advanced that you can write two or three lines of code online and download real time satellite images and analyze those in real-time.
00:13:59 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
So, what I want to get with this is that all these water-related problems -- they might not specifically be particular to one branch of science or engineering. Lots of them are collaborating together to look at it from different aspects.
What I can tell you is environmental scientists and environmental engineers mostly focus on the quality of our water bodies. That could be wetlands or lakes. And water resources engineers and hydrologists mostly are interested in the quantity of water, right? And then these two together will be able to give you a holistic idea of what is going on in our water bodies, when it comes to quality and quantity.
00:14:38 Mae Macfarlane
OK. That's perfect. Yeah, the intersectionality I feel is very interesting, especially like looking at just how expansive the Twin Cities here is. And there's so much marshland and everything and how we're able to adapt and continue to grow.
00:14:53 Mae Macfarlane
So you teach multiple civil engineering courses and I was kind of looking through your website. What kind are they? And a lot of them obviously deal with the environment.
And do you take a special interest in that more than just like the obvious, like movement of water and how that and the measurement of it? How do you incorporate more of a holistic environmental aspect to your courses to kind of get at that intersectionality that we were just talking about?
00:15:21 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
That's a good point.
So I teach many courses. Civil engineering students, when they start their program. they have a course called Engineering 100. All the engineering students , all the first year students, engineering, they take this course.
This is a course that we introduce students to engineering design.
How to come up with a framework for design. And that design could be a mechanical engineering design, an electrical engineering design, or civil engineering design. I would say that's the foundation of any type of engineering design. So that, of course, is one of my favorite courses because I get to introduce students to something new.
How to think like an engineer, right? How to think like not just a civil engineer, how to think holistically as an engineer.
So how to define a problem? How to research possible solutions for that problem? And how to come up with some prototypes and so on and so forth. So that's an introductory course that I teach. And then as we go on in the civil engineering curriculum, I teach some specific courses such as water resources engineering, environmental engineering, or fluid mechanics.
All these courses are somehow related together as we discussed right? My approach is to make sure that I focus on areas that are interconnected.
00:16:41 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
For example, when I teach water resources engineering, I always tell my students that you're gonna hear about this course when you are taking environmental engineering, because if you do not know how to estimate the quantity of water, then you're not gonna be able to estimate and figure out the quality of water.
These two are interconnected and sometimes if you sometimes they give case studies and real examples of how engineers in different disciplines, and scientists in different disciplines, work with each other to solve these problems.
00:17:13 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
My approach in education and in teaching is hands on.
If I can tell you something that's good, but if I can show you something and you have hands on, hands on it, doing some type of coding, doing some type of geographical analysis. Or, if you're going into a field and you are observing something, the retention of that course material is going to be higher and higher. And this is the approach that I'm to adopt as much as possible because I know how students appreciate these hands on and observational approaches in teaching.
00:17:49 Mae Macfarlane
Yeah, that's definitely a way that I like to learn and I'm a very tangible learner. And so I think having those real world applications are very helpful and much more interesting way to be interested.
So another way that you've been able to expand your teaching and just like interactive ways for your students is … I know you have a YouTube channel. Can you explain to us a little bit about like the inspiration or like why you wanted to have that extra outlet outside of the classroom?
00:18:18 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
Yes, that's a funny story. So when I was doing my PhD, I had a colleague and I used to joke with her that ... Mae, have you watched Big Bang Theory? OK, so you know Sheldon Cooper? Yes.
Sheldon Cooper used to have a YouTube channel called Fun with Flax, so he was my inspiration to start a YouTube channel. And the joke between me and my colleagues during our PhD program was that Mohsen is going to start a YouTube channel and name it “Fun with Hydrology.”
So this is how the idea of it, this is how it got started, because when you think about hydrology, people are … can be categorized into two different classes.
There is a certain type of people that are super interested in our natural and physical environment that they want to learn about it a lot, right?
There's another type that is like, well, “it's water cycle and it's working. That's how much I want to know about it,” right?
00:19:14 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
The idea behind the YouTube channel was to tell both sides that something that you see as simple as a rainfall, that we can understand and comprehend how it works, has different layers to it from the formation of the water drop to how to translate that rainfall into a language that a computer can understand, and then we can use that translation to do other stuff with it, right?
00:19:41 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
So that was the idea behind the YouTube channel. I have used that YouTube channel in my classes. Right now I will what I do is recording some short. videos and then post that as pre-class videos in my different classes. And I asked students to watch these short videos before classroom and then when they are in class they are ... their mind is prepared to go on and talk about different topics in hydrology and water resources in engineering.
00:20:10 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
So far I think I have about like 25 videos or something like that. But I'm working on a lot more material for that YouTube channel and some at someday I'm gonna change the name to “Fun with Hydrology.”
00:20:24 Mae Macfarlane
OK. That's a great idea.
I watched a couple of them and while a lot of it was kind of just going over my head -- I don't have the engineering background -- It was very interesting to watch and I can just feel how, like, impactful that is, like you said.
Like that'd be a great pre-class thing. The longest one I watched was like 15 minutes.
00:20:43 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
Right.
00:20:43 Mae Macfarlane
And that's not pushing the time span of interest, but the thing that I was most amazed by is that you're writing backwards on the clear board.
00:20:53 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
OK, so I'm not a superhuman, I'm writing correctly and then after in editing, they're going to flip the flip the camera photo. Yes, I wish I could write backwards though, and that that would be a very cool supernatural power for [DMA1] me.
00:21:07 Mae Macfarlane
I was just like, how is he doing that and explaining what he's doing, he's being.
Like the camera. OK, yeah.
00:21:17 Mae Macfarlane
The videos were just like really informational and very … what I could take from them made a lot of sense for me as a non-engineering person.
00:21:25 Mae Macfarlane
So and we'll be able to like link all your fun stuff on our description for the podcast to get you more views.
00:21:25 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
Glad to hear. Perfect.
Yes, and subscribers.
00:21:36 Mae Macfarlane
Yes, like and subscribe.
00:21:39 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
You're watching this video? Click on subscribe button.
00:21:45 Mae Macfarlane
What is one question about hydrology or about civil engineering just in general that nobody really asks that you wish that they would.
00:21:56 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
Hmm, that's a that's a very good question.
I'm trying to remember all the questions that people ask and then figure see if I can correlate that with the question that people usually don't ask
00:22:06 Mae Macfarlane
Maybe a way to help you answer that is what would middle school Mohsen ask you?
00:22:12 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
it's been so long, I'm not that old, but it's been so long that I don't remember what questions I had.
OK.
I can … I can try.
I think when people think about water resources engineering, they usually think about very narrow, specific jobs that civil engineers do, right.
They are living in an urban area. They usually think about all the pipes that carry water from point A to point B, right?
If they are living in more rural-ish area, they usually think about irrigation and how water is used to grow crops.
However, water resources engineering is very, very broad. It can contain the sewer system, the system of pipes that collect the stormwater from the cities and then dump it into the river system. It can contain making or building a small or very large dam. It contains making an open channel that moves water from one area to the area where … that you need water. It can be making a reservoir. Making a culvert, so on and so forth
It could be even measuring the amount of water that goes through a channel. It could be a natural channel or an artificial, man-made channel. So it's a very broad area of engineering, right, but understandably, when you when I tell you that I'm a water resources engineer, naturally there are specific points that comes to your mind.
00:23:37 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
My goal is to convey the message that all these different aspects of water resources engineering exist, and if you are interested in it, there are multiple ways that you can learn more about it. And see if you want to be a civil engineer, and specifically a water resources engineer.
00:23:56 Mae Macfarlane
That was a wonderful answer. You nailed it.
00:23:57 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
Thank you.
00:23:59 Mae Macfarlane
So, what made you want to become a professor? Was that kind of the plan all along? Or what drew you to the world of academia?
00:24:07 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
Mae, you know that the answer to this question is gonna be dorky, right?
OK, so I was reading some of some of the notes that I wrote about 11 years ago, right? And I I'm the type of person that didn't used to write a lot of notes, but I have some notes.
So I was reading one of those and in my notes I wrote that “I will one day teach fluid mechanics at a university” and I was very specific, even about the subject, right.
And I really, I definitely know why I wrote that, because I really enjoyed the topic -- the general topic of fluid mechanics. And the professor that I had he was teaching us fluid mechanics in a way that we really enjoyed it, right. And that's why I wanted to teach fluid mechanics.
But I think I've been an educator for a very long time. I remember that I was only 18 years old when I started teaching English as a second language, ESL, and I really liked it.
I really liked how it felt to learn something as you are teaching it and how it solidifies the things that you know when you are repeating them, repeating them again and again. And every time that you are teaching something, you're gonna come up with a new way of delivering that.
And that's awesome to me.
So if I teach water resources this semester, next semester, the way that I teach it is absolutely different from the way that I taught it last semester because I learned some stuff and I'm going to incorporate what I learned into teaching of that material. And this is what makes me excited and motivated to teach.
00:25:45 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
Also, I don't want to factor out this important and essential factor that students’ motivation is very important factor of being a professor and being an educator. When I see students like you that are very, very motivated and very, very excited about what they're learning, I'm like
“Yes, this This is why I am an educator! And I'm going to do my best to make sure they make them excited about the topic that there are there are interest in!”
So I get my all of my energy from students and when I get this motivation I will do my best to make sure that I provide the best quality of education for all of my students.
00:26:25 Mae Macfarlane
Well, that just made my day hearing that. And it's not as dorky as you think. And I think having a good teacher does go a long way.
It's a lot of the professors I've asked that question have had that same, relatively same experience where they just had an impactful college professor or a high school teacher that changed their thinking.
00:26:50 Merrie Davidson
I think this is probably related to your last answer.
When I'm listening to you, the thing that comes through is your passion. Passion for teaching, Passion for the topic. Passion for research.
It's just passion, which is so awesome, so that you know, if I took your class and I didn't have any interest in hydrology anyway, I'd be like, “wow, this must be great because nobody else would be jumping around if it weren't.” How do you, I guess, how you keep your passion going is through students and their relationships with you and stuff.
00:27:22 Mae Macfarlane
So I guess my question to kind of bounce off of that would be like how have you kept your passion and your energy through COVID when you can't have that one-on-one experience with your students in the classroom and you know, there's only so much energy you can pick up through a screen.
And I mean, your YouTube videos are awesome, but it's not having the same interaction. And the I found that through zoom it's harder to ask questions. So how have you been able to keep your students interested? Your self interested? and kind of manage teacher burnout.
00:27:55 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
Yes, let me first mention that passion is everything when it comes to education.
If I am passionate about a topic that I'm teaching, and if I'm passionate about a topic that I'm doing research on, everybody else around me is going to become passionate about it as well.
If I go to a classroom and I just tell my students that this is what you need to read and this is what you need to do, and that's it, nobody's going to be interested in that topic as well, right.
And we have all, we have had that experience. What I try to do is try to be funny about it.
00:28:27 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
I mean, I know that all the jokes that I make are probably very old, bad jokes, but they are better than no jokes, right?
And so the YouTube videos that you see online, these are more formal videos. The formal side of myself. When I am in a classroom, I am not that serious.
I try to make things, I try to bring stuff in a classroom that do not make sense. Like when I teach fluid mechanics, I go to a classroom with a ping pong ball, The funnel. And I show the principle behind an equation using these objects, right?
And I tell the students that I'm going to tell you a party trick today. So behind that party trick is going to be a principle of fluid mechanics.
This is how people get passionate about things.
00:29:10 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
If I tell you that today I am here to talk about Bernoulli's principle and we are going to solve three examples and three equations simultaneously. You're going to be, “oh, this is going to be one of those classes,” right?
00:29:21 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
But if I enter a classroom and I tell you that I have a ping pong ball and I have a funnel. I want one volunteer over here to blow inside the funnel and hit the ceiling with this ping pong, then you're going to be…”Are we learning something or are we just having a fun time in the classroom” … which, when you have the fun time then learning is going to happen in the middle of that the fun time that you have in a classroom.
00:29:44 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
So this is my approach. How does COVID and how did COVID impact my ability of doing that?
If I tell you that everything was OK. I am lying, right?
So it was difficult. It was difficult for instructors. It was difficult for students, but there were ways to make sure that students are engaged.
They could share some videos. They could share some photos, and I was trying to cheer them up using the videos that I sent them.
I tried to add as much memes as possible in my slides to make sure that we keep the level of fun in our slides. So, we did our best and we learned a lot, right.
00:30:24 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
Some of these approaches that I'm using in my classroom right now are the things that I learned during COVID, like the concept of short videos. Short pre-class videos is coming from COVID and how students like watching these videos and how they have access to these videos for life.
So what I want to tell you, it's a constant learning. Whatever happens, good or bad. If you take a look at it with the mindset of” I am going to gain something from it and I'm I'll be able to use that in future in my teaching career or in my career in industry,” that's the successful mindset, and that's the mindset that helps you to be successful as an educator or as an engineer.
00:31:06 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
I've been told by my students that sometimes I've tried to channel Bill Nye.
00:31:11 Merrie Davidson
Oh, good job!
00:31:12 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
And they like it.
00:31:14 Mae Macfarlane
I think that's a very high compliment.
00:31:16 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
I've also been told that I look like, who's that comedian?
Last Week Tonight?
Andrea Koeppe and Merrie Davidson
That’s our favorite!!! John Oliver!
00:31:23 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
I don't think that's a compliment though, right?
00:31:25 Mae Macfarlane
That is a compliment. As a journalist, I love that.
00:31:28 Andrea Koeppe
Actually, if I can ask a question, I hate to kind of bring it down, ut John Oliver did a long segment on water and the problems. And he focused on the Colorado River.
And so I wanted to ask you, are you kind of? You know, I know that, OK, that the problems I know are real, but do you are you kind of optimistic about solutions, about what can be done in regions that are really lacking the water. And it's here in the United States?
00:31:55 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
Yeah, that episode -- First of all, my wife has sent it to me and I'm still, I still need to watch it.
So I haven't watched it yet, but absolutely, I agree the water problems are here, and they’re here to stay.
What we can do … Obviously we cannot control, we cannot control the natural, what happens naturally.
We cannot control rainfall, for example. Or at least right now. But what we can do is the management side of that. We should be able to manage the amount of water that we have to be able to have some leftovers at the end. It's like we call it “water budgeting.” It's like budgeting your income, right?
00:32:34 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
So when you get amount of money in the beginning of the month, you are going to manage that so, you have some amount of money at the end of the month.
This is the approach that hydrologists use in water budgeting as well. So, depending on how much water is gonna be inputs to our city, state, country, we should be able to manage that water, so we are not using and overusing more than what we have and that's depending on where you live, could be, could have different implications and different approaches.
Let me see if I can find that GIF and share it with you.
00:33:09 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
It's a GIF that I have created using satellite imagery of Lake Mead, right behind Hoover Dam. And it shows when … because of urban growth, how it changes the size of the size of Lake Mead next to Las Vegas. And the problem is that the population is getting higher and higher. And the main source of water in that area is Lake Mead.
So I am going to actually. I know that I shared it in one of my classes, so I'm going to start that.
00:33:40 Merrie Davidson
You know, I grew up in California and Southern California was stealing water from Northern California for years and years and years.
And Northern California did do some kinds of management, but it really didn't work because people in Los Angeles weren't managing the water. And there is a really huge fight…
00:34:01 Mae Macfarlane
I knew there was some drama around that the California situation regarding water, because the desalinization process is too expensive, right?
And that's why the state hasn't been able to use that as a water source I believe.
00:34:14 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
Right. And right the countries that are leading the effort for desalinization are mostly Middle Eastern countries, Israel, ITAR, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia.
These are the pioneers in that, and the hope is that at some point they are going to make this technology cheap enough so we can use that for other countries for various purposes as well.
00:34:40 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
I found that video. I found the YouTube video of that video, but I'm going to … this Is ... I didn't create this version of it but I will be able to share with you and when I find it the version that I created.
00:34:52 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
OK, let me share my screen. OK, so this area is the urban area and you can see the year over here.
You'll see that the urban area is growing and growing.
You see, it’s kind of red because when you download a satellite imagery and process it, the urban area shows as red areas. And this is obviously Lake Mead and the dam. The Hoover Dam should be somewhere over here. So it's 1990 right now because it goes year by year. You're not able to see the changes in Lake Mead yet. What I can do right now is pause it over here, go back to maybe 1974.
So this is the area. And now go to. There we go 2010 and 1972. You can see how it's shrinking.
And the last year that they have in this video is 2010. Oh, this one is 2021. So this should be even better.
OK so. This is… See how the lake is shrinking.
00:35:48 Merrie Davidson
The other thing is that you're talking about having a global/holistic view of everything and I'm sure climate change is huge.
Do you feel there's a way that we can salvage our earth?
00:36:00 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
I wish I had the answer to that question. That would be $1,000,000 question. I think there is a possibility that we can do it and we have shown as human beings we have shown that we would do really good when we are under pressure.
So this gives me hope that we still can find a way to fix things.
How we can do that? There are different theories of what we should do and how people are up for it.
That's another question that if I give you as scientific community, if I give you a solution, are you up for it? Are you gonna do it?
Or is it gonna be too expensive from different aspects? Socially, economically, engineering aspects for people to do it?
00:36:36 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
But OK, so I guess one question related to your question that I can answer is what is the future of water resources engineering? What is the direction that is going? And to answer that question, I think water resources engineering is using a lot of data right now. We call it big data. A lot of big data.
We are using satellite images. We are using different sensors and satellite images to give us a lot of information about the surface, about water, about land.
00:37:04 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
I remember 15 years ago, if you wanted to classify land use of a country, you needed to spend a lot of time to do that. Right now, because of the abundance of all these satellite images, you can do the same task less than a minute using 2 lines of code online.
So the speed up progress is really fast.
00:37:25 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
If you tell me which part of the world you want some data on, I can get a satellite image for you with the resolution of 30 meters. Like very, very fine resolution and give you exactly that part of the world and what's going on right now.
So this gives me a lot of hope and this gives me a lot of excitement that we can leverage, all that data that is available to us right now, which was not available to us like 15 years ago. And we can use all of this information, all of this big data to make informed decisions, to improve the accuracy of the models, to make better models that can predict better.
Right now we are doing millions and trillions of megabytes of processing in factor of seconds.
This is amazing.
This is … this has given us a power that we have never had before, so I am super excited to see where this journey is going to take us and what we can do with the amount of data and the amount of creativity that people are going to bring to the table and what we can do with that.
So this is an exciting time for me and hopefully we can do good with this data and information that we have.
00:38:35 Mae Macfarlane
Thank you so much for joining us, Mohsen
00:38:37 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
Thank you very much. Glad to be here.
00:38:39 Mae Macfarlane
To learn more about Mohsen’s work you can find them on the St Paul campus of the University of St Thomas.
00:38:45 Mae Macfarlane
The Professor Podcast is brought to you by the St Thomas libraries and made possible with funding from the College of Arts and Sciences.
I'm your host, Mae Macfarlane a 2022 graduate. The producers and library staff are Merrie Davidson, Andrea Koeppe, and Trent Brager.
Thank you so much to our guests and you, our listeners.
00:39:04 Mohsen Tahmasebi Nasab
Yeah. Now let's go walk by the Mississippi River.
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