The College of Engineering, Department of Water Resources Engineering, in cooperation with government departments and institutions and in coordination with the Continuing Education Unit at the College, organized a scientific workshop on water resources management using modern technologies in the presence of the Head of the Department, Prof. Dr. Basem Shebaa Abed, and a number of teachers, department employees, and graduate students.
The activity aimed to enhance scientific understanding in the field of water resources management through the exchange of experiences and the use of modern tools such as Google Earth Engine and SSEBop to analyze natural phenomena as well as encourage students to use modern technologies in their research and expanding the partnership with the National Center for Water Resources Management to develop joint research and projects to solve local challenges, such as the problem of water scarcity in Iraq.
The workshop program included scientific lectures presented by a group of specialists in this field, where Dr. Ziad Jamil Keitan, Director of the Groundwater Studies Department at the National Center for Water Resources Management, gave a lecture on “Operational Simplified Surface Energy Balance Model (SSEBop), in which he addressed the evaporation process, its components, and methods of measurement. Dr. Ahmed Nazim Kuwer, Assistant Director of the Department of Groundwater Studies, gave a lecture on groundwater in Iraq and its locations. Mr. Mustafa Walid Abdul Latif, Chief of Programmers in the Data Collection and Evaluation Division at the Center, gave a lecture on the uses of “The Google Earth Engine” in the study of natural, geographical, and climatic phenomena.
At the end of the workshop, a set of recommendations was presented that focus on enhancing scientific and research cooperation and expanding the partnership with the National Center for Water Resources Management to develop joint research and projects, emphasizing encouraging students to use modern digital tools to analyze geographical and climatic data, and the importance of applying tools such as Google Earth Engine to study climate changes and natural phenomena, as well as the need to allocate research and studies on groundwater in Iraq, with a proposal to prepare applied models to evaluate evaporation using SSEBop in Iraqi different regions.