Dr. hab. Renata Romanowicz

e-mail: r.romanowicz(at)lancaster.ac.uk

tel: 01524 593966

Room: B536, Environmental Science Department

Current Position

Post-doctoral research fellow in hydrology as part of the DEFRA-Environment Agency funded Flood Risk Management Consortium (FRMRC, http://www.floodrisk.org.uk/)

Educational Qualifications

  • M.Sc. in Automatic Control, Warsaw University of Technology, Warsaw, Poland. Thesis title: Nonlinear constrained optimisation methods.
  • Ph.D. in Physical Sciences, Institute of Geophysics, Polish Academy of Sciences. Thesis title: Hierarchical control of system of storage reservoirs with stochastic inflows.
  • Doctor of Science, Institute of Geophysics, Polish Academy of Sciences. Thesis title: Modelling of Environmental processes under uncertainty.

    • Research Interests

    My work in the Institute of Geophysics, Poland, University College Dublin and Lancaster University has focused on the mathematical modelling of hydrological systems. These have included:
  • Optimal control of flood protection reservoirs, stochastic dynamic programming for reservoir regulation, problems of stochastic control in water resources systems, hierarchical optimisation of water distribution systems with stochastic inflows.
  • Analytical modelling of infiltration and evaporation processes in the unsaturated zone for General Circulation Models, testing soil moisture codes in GCMs, stochastic analysis of surface fluxes, development of a lumped unsaturated zone model with stochastic inputs, random parameters and random initial conditions, derivation of analytical solution for Richard’s equation with variable input.
  • Research on GIS and distributed hydrological modelling: the project involved Maximum Likelihood estimation, sensitivity analysis, unsaturated zone soil moisture modelling, catchment modelling, flood routing, on-line GIS application of rainfall-flow routing model, TOPMODEL.
  • Calibration of distributed hydrological models: development of a distributed flood inundation model in FORTRAN and SIMULINK (Matlab®), Maximum Likelihood/Bayesian estimation, sensitivity analysis, methodology for on-line updating of probabilities of inundation along the river during floods.
  • Environmental Risk assessment; modelling dispersion of pollutants in air and marine environment.
  • Statistical analysis of environmental variables (EEC project, “Estimation of Human Impact In the Presence of Natural Fluctuations”) using CAPTAIN toolbox http://www.es.lancs.ac.uk/cres/captain/; applications in rainfall-flow, water quality and air pollution modelling.
  • Estimation techniques and predictive uncertainty, Data Based Mechanistic Modelling, Data Assimilation techniques and distributed predictions.

    • Current Research Interests and Related Scientific Achievements Methodological

  • Problems of stochastic control in water resources systems, hierarchical optimisation of stochastic problems. Research in the field of stochastic and deterministic analytical models of environmental systems, linear theory of open channel flow, GIS and distributed modelling (Romanowicz, 1984, Romanowicz et al., 1988, Brandyk and Romanowicz, 1989).
  • Maximum Likelihood estimation, sensitivity analysis, calibration of distributed models in the presence of uncertainty, predictive uncertainty (Romanowicz et al., 1994, 1996, Romanowicz and Beven, 1998, 2005).
  • Data assimilation techniques applied to time and spatially variable environmental processes (Romanowicz et al., 2000, 2003, Romanowicz and Young, 2003).

    • Applications

  • Spatial variability of Land Surface Processes; stochastic control of water storage systems; unsaturated zone modelling in the presence of uncertainty, lumped and spatially distributed models for flow, flood inundation modelling (Romanowicz et al., 1995, Romanowicz and Beven, 2003).
  • Data-Based Mechanistic modelling of environmental systems. This involves e.g. modelling and forecasting of rainfall-flow processes, water quality models, hydrological modelling of rainfall and flow processes and other applications (Romanowicz and Petersen, 2004,
  • Data assimilation techniques applied to environmental modelling: rainfall-flow and air pollution problems (Romanowicz et al., 2000, 2005).
  • Development of on-line flood forecasting techniques and their application in Flood Forecasting and Warning Systems (Romanowicz et al., 2004, 2005).

    • Developed Tools

  • SIMULINK TOPMODEL
  • FORTRAN and SIMULINK Flood Inundation Models
  • On-line Flood Forecasting System (work in progress).

    • Selected Publications and Presentations

    Peer Reviewed Papers
  • Romanowicz R.J. and R. Macdonald, 2005, Modelling Uncertainty and Variability in Environmental Systems, Acta Geophysica Polonica, 53, 401-417.
  • Romanowicz R.J, K.J. Beven, and P.C. Young, 2005, Uncertainty propagation in a sequential model for flood forecasting, IAHS Red Book, in press.
  • Romanowicz R.J., Young P.C., Diggle P. and P. Brown, 2005, Normalisation of environmental air quality data using spatio-temporal analysis, Environmental Modelling and Software Journal, in press.
  • Romanowicz R. J. and K. Beven, 2004, Comments on Generalised Likelihood Uncertainty Estimation, Reliability Engineering and System Safety, in press.
  • Romanowicz R. J., P. C. Young and K. J. Beven, 2004,Assessing Uncertainty in Assessing Flood Risk, Proceedings of First International Conference on Flood Risk Assessment, Bath, U.K., 2004, 127-138.
  • Romanowicz R. J., K. J. Beven and P. C. Young, 2004, Data assimilation in the identification of flood inundation models: derivation of on-line multi-step ahead predictions of flows, In: B. Webb, N. Arnell, C. Onf, N. MacIntyre, R. Gurney and C. Kirby (eds) BHS International Conference: Hydrology, Science and Practice for the 21st century, London, July 2004, 1, 348-353.
  • Romanowicz R. J., U. Callies and P. C. Young, 2004, Water Quality Modelling in Rivers with Limited Observational Data: River Elbe Case Study, In Pahl-Wostl, C., Schmidt, S. and Jakeman, T. (eds) iEMSs 2004 International Congress: "Complexity and Integrated Resources Management". International Environmental Modelling and Software Society, Osnabrueck, Germany, June 2004, 1, 235-245.
  • Romanowicz, R. J., Young, P. C., 2003, Data Assimilation and Uncertainty Analysis of Environmental Assessment Problems - an Application of Transfer Function and Generalised Likelihood Uncertainty Estimation Techniques, Reliability Engineering and System Safety 79, 161-174.
  • Romanowicz R. J. and K. J. Beven, 2003, Estimation of flood inundation probabilities as conditioned on event inundation maps, Water Resources Research, VOL. 39, NO. 3, 10.1029/2001WR001056.
  • Romanowicz R.J. and W. Petersen, 2003, Modelling algae concentrations in Elbe in the years 1985-2001 using observations of daily oxygen concentrations, temperature and pH, Acta Hydrochimica et Hydrobiologica, 31, 319-333.
  • Romanowicz, R. J., Young, P. C., 2002, Data assimilation and uncertainty analysis of environmental pollution problems, Proc. IEMSS 2002 Conference, Lugano, Switzerland, II, 49-54.
  • Romanowicz R. J., H. Higson and I. Teasdale, 2000, Bayesian Uncertainty Estimation Methodology applied to air pollution modelling, Environmetrics, 11, 351-371.
  • Romanowicz R. J. and K. J. Beven, 1998, Dynamic real time predictions of flood inundation probabilities, IAHS Hydrological Sciences Journal, 43, 181-196.
  • Romanowicz, R. J., 1997, A MATLAB implementation of TOPMODEL, Hydrological Processes, 11, 1115-1129.
  • Romanowicz R. J., K. J. Beven and J. Tawn, 1996, Bayesian calibration of flood inundation models, in M G Anderson and D E Walling (Eds) Floodplain Processes, Wiley, Chester, 333-360.
  • Romanowicz R.J., J. C. I. Dooge and J. P. O'Kane, 1995, Spatial variability of evaporation from the land surface - random initial conditions, in : New Uncertainty Concepts in Hydrology and Water Resources, ed. Z. Kundzewicz, Cambridge University Press, 197-205.
  • Romanowicz R. J., K. J. Beven and J. A. Tawn, 1994, Evaluation of predictive uncertainty in nonlinear hydrological models using a Bayesian Approach, in "Statistics for the Environment (2), Water Related Issues", ed. V. Barnett and F. Turkman, Wiley, Chichester, pp. 297-318.
  • Romanowicz R. J., K. J. Beven, R. Moore, 1994, GIS and distributed hydrologic models, in "Geographical Information Handling - Research and Applications, ed. P.M. Mather, pp. 197-205.
  • Strupczewski, W., Romanowicz R. J., 1991, Invariance of the IUH first cumulants of simplified linear St. Venant models, Adv. Water Resources, 14, 175-182.
  • Brandyk, T., Romanowicz R. J., 1989, Some aspects of soil moisture control for soils with shallow groundwater levels, IAHS Publ., 188, B1, 1-10.
  • Romanowicz, R.,J., J.C.I. Dooge, Z. W.Kundzewicz, 1988, Moments and cumulants of linearized St. Venant equation, Adv. Water Resources, 11, 92-100.
  • Romanowicz, R. J., 1984, The control of water distribution system without regular information concerning inflows, Acta Geophysica Polonica, vol. XXXII, No 4, 447-458

    • Other Interests

    The company of friends, reading (favourites: Mann, Tolkien, Le Guin, Zelazny, Murakami, Ringu Tulku), drawing and painting (especially trees), gardening, mushroom hunting, hill walking, kayaking, cross-country skiing.