Declan O’Shea wins Sir Ronald East Prize

Congratulations to HARC’s Declan O’Shea who was awarded the 2018 Sir Ronald East prize. This annual prize is awarded by the Victorian Water Engineering Branch of Engineers Australia for the best final year undergraduate research project.

Declan’s research topic was Parameterisation of SWMOD for design flood loss estimation using AWRA-L attributes. For this study, the relationship between parameters of the loss model SWMOD and outputs from the Australian Water Resources Assessment – Landscape (AWRA-L) was investigated using 35 rural Australian catchments. SWMOD is a probability distributed model that represents the variability in soil moisture holding capacity within a catchment as a cumulative probability distribution.

The research project was jointly supervised by Assoc Prof. Rory Nathan from the University of Melbourne and Peter Hill of HARC.

Congratulations Declan!