Meet our WRC Researcher

When it comes to water, Dr Ze Jiang is interested in extremes.

A postdoctoral researcher and ARC Early Career Industry Fellow at the Water Research Centre (WRC), Ze has built his academic reputation on predicting the worst-case scenarios that water can deliver.

“There are two extremes in hydrology: one is flood, when we have too much rainfall, and the other is drought, where we have too little,” he says.

“I developed a statistical methodology to forecast these kinds of sustained dry or wet conditions. The power of the method is that we’re able to forecast these things with quite a long lead time.”

That method is called the WAvelet System Prediction (WASP), an open-source tool compatible with various programming languages such as R, MATLAB and Python. In simple terms, Ze says, it’s equivalent to taking a photo and using filters or removal tools to reduce clutter in the image, thereby revealing its central focus in more striking detail. 

“Similarly, WASP seeks to reduce hydrology data ‘noise’,” he says.

“We’re trying to remove the noise that’s not related to floods or droughts, which them leaves us with clear-signal information to predict droughts and floods more accurately.”

Ze might seem perfectly at home in the world of hydrology research, but he came to his career in a roundabout way. As an undergraduate student in his home country of China, he studied environmental engineering before moving to Europe to pursue a master’s degree in hydro informatics and water resource management.

“Then, as I was studying there, I slowly shifted to the hydrology side,” he says.

After his master’s degree, he spent two years doing flood modelling work in Singapore, but his hydrology research interests had soon expanded beyond the bounds of his role. In 2018, he arrived at UNSW to commence his PhD, which is how the WASP system came into being.

Now three years into his postdoctoral career, Ze has been named an ARC Early Career Industry Fellow. Over the next two years, he’ll develop a map for water resource management in the Greater Sydney area using the WASP system to help project future conditions.

Sydney, like cities across the globe, is already feeling the impacts of a changing climate, with changes in rainfall patterns one of the biggest signs.

“Over the past few years, we’ve seen extensive dry conditions which resulted in the 2019/2020 bushfires. Then right after that, we received a huge amount of rainfall over a year,” Ze says.

“This kind of shifting from extreme drought to extreme wet is one of the challenges we have now under climate change.” 

Ze’s Industry Fellowship will be focused on predicting and mapping water availability in the Sydney region in the coming years. WaterNSW, which operates the state’s dams, will come on board as the industry partner.

By better forecasting future wet and dry conditions, Ze aims to provide WaterNSW with usable data that the organisation can use to predict dam inflows and enhance their management of the state’s bulk water resources.

In future, he’d like to test out the WASP system on problems beyond the hydrology sphere. At the Water Research Centre, home to academics from across the breadth of the water research disciplines, the potential for new collaborations is almost limitless.

“The approach we developed is a generic method — it can be applied to other disciplines as well. The key is to find the right problem,” he says.

“I think with the very broad spectrum of researchers here, we’ll have lots of opportunities.”