Workshop 1: Water Rights, Ecology, and Best Practices – A Day of Hands-On Water Right Analysis with an Ecology Water Master
Has Ecology sent a report back to you completely marked up with unexpected feedback? Did it lead to project delays and changes to the budget?
Spend a day with Kellie Gillingham, one of Ecology’s Water Masters, working through multiple exercises to better understand how Ecology staff use their own databases and other public data when permitting decisions. We’ll re-familiarize ourselves with Ecology’s Water Right and Well Log Datasets, GIS, reading legal descriptions, accessing historic land records, and Ecology’s policies and procedures.
Bring your laptop and power supply, this is going to be an interactive day! This also counts as 8 hours of Continuing Education for Certified Water Right Examiners (CWREs).
Workshop 2: Optimizing Water Wellfield Performance
Light breakfast provided, lunch on your own.
This workshop will provide water system managers, operators, engineering consultants and well drillers some important tools for optimizing long term well performance and wellfield operation. Completion of this workshop will provide Continuing education units (CEU) pending approval.
Workshop 3: Python Applications in Hydrogeology
MODFLOW is a free, open-source, and widely used groundwater modeling program relied upon by government scientists, academic researchers, and private consultants to address complex groundwater flow and transport problems.
The purpose of this workshop is to provide an overview of the latest version of the U.S. Geological Survey MODFLOW program (MODFLOW 6) and demonstrate how models are developed using the Python-based FloPy package. The workshop will combine short lectures of underlying concepts with practical, hands-on exercises to demonstrate modern workflows for constructing, running, and post-processing groundwater models.
Workshop 4: AI Applications with Environmental Data
Artificial intelligence (AI) and related machine learning (ML) approaches are all the rage these days, with AI tools popping up in everyday life in facets such as web searching, meeting summaries, writing/grammar suggestions, and code development. Environmental work is an evolving area for AI, with significant potential. Given the decades of information from research and application in the environmental science domain, there is a lot of information to draw as a basis for AI tools. This training workshop with PNNL staff will introduce participants to AI/ML concepts and approaches. After an overview, we will look at the span of methods/algorithms, talk about data, get into what prompt engineering is about, and discuss cautions and best practices. Instructors will go through a suite of example applications to illustrate how AI/ML can be used for environmental science. Then participants will have an opportunity to do hands on investigation of AI tools and approaches (bring your own laptop).