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Drew Gronewold
Associate Professor
On sabbatical Winter 2025–Fall 2025
Ecosystem Science and Management
Climate + Energy
Water
Cross-cutting
Office
2008 Dana
Websites
About
Professor Gronewold’s research interests lie in hydrological modeling, with a focus on propagating uncertainty and variability into model-based water resources management decisions. His specific research areas include predicting runoff in ungauged basins, monitoring and understanding water quality dynamics in coastal areas, and incorporating probability theory and Bayesian statistics into watershed-scale data sets and forecasting tools. Professor Gronewold is also the lead PI for the US on the NSF-funded Global Center for Understanding Climate Change Impacts on Transboundary Waters.
He holds adjunct appointments in the U-M Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. Prior to his appointment in SEAS, he worked in the NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory as a hydrologist and physical scientist.
Publications
Recent representative publications:
- Zuo, C., Wang, R., Hong, Y., Zhou, Y., He, Y., & Gronewold, A. D. (2024). The influence of road network topology on street flooding in New York City - a social media data approach. Journal of Hydrology, 638, 131471.
- Sorensen, T., Espey, E., Kelley, J. G. W., Kessler, J., & Gronewold, A. D. (2024). A database of in situ water temperatures for large inland lakes across the coterminous United States. Scientific Data, 11(1), 282. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-024-03103-8
- Mei, Y., Mai, J., Do, H. X., Gronewold, A. D., Reeves, H., Eberts, S., Niswonger, R., Regan, R. S., & Hunt, R. J. (2023). Can hydrological models benefit from using global soil moisture, evapotranspiration, and runoff products as calibration targets? Water Resources Research, 59(2), e2022WR032064. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1029/2022WR032064
- Gronewold, A. D., Do, H. X., Mei, Y., & Stow, C. A. (2021). A tug-of-war within the hydrologic cycle of a continental freshwater basin. Geophysical Research Letters, 48(4), e2020GL090374. https://doi.org/10.1029/2020GL090374
Research
Representative research initiatives:
- 2024 - 2029: National Science Foundation - ($4,970,000); Global Center for Understanding Climate Change Impacts on Transboundary Waters.
- 2023 - 2025: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration - ($347,883); Advancing modeling to support probabilistic projections of total water levels in Great Lakes coastal areas under climate scenarios: Development of next-generation prediction system.
- 2022 - 2024: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Joint Technology Transfer Initiative (JTTI) - ($499,936); An optimized lake-treatment strategy for improved land-surface modeling and weather prediction in the Unified Forecast System (UFS).
Education
PhD, Duke University (Environmental Science and Policy)
BS, Cornell University (Civil and Environmental Engineering)
Affiliations
- Session co-chair, “Using new data and technology to better understand freshwater and lake systems: end-to-end remote sensing and regional modeling approaches”, AGU Annual Meeting, New Orleans, December 2017
- Session co-chair, “Regional water management: development and application of modeling and data for decisions”, 2017 International Association of Great Lakes Research annual meeting, Detroit, Michigan. June 2017.
- Lead convener, workshop on Great Lakes Hydrological Modeling, Ann Arbor, MI, 2016
- Session co-chair, “Interactions between large lakes and regional climate”, 2016 International Asso-ciation of Great Lakes Research annual meeting, University of Guelph, June 2016.
- Great Lakes Ensemble Advisory Committee (GLISA), 2015
In the News
In the Media