The faculty of the EMRL are actively involved in several research areas. The research is funded
by a combination of internal funds from software royalties and external research sponsors. 
Graduate students include both M.S. and Ph.D. candidates. Undergraduate students often
participate in the research as well. Our primary sponsor is the US Army Engineer Research
and Development Center. Other sponsors include the Dept. of Energy, the Environmental
Protection Agency, the Federal Highway Administration, and L.A. County.

Groundwater Modeling

In the groundwater area, the EMRL conducts research in geo-statistics, 3D plume characterization,
3D characterization of stratigraphic units, 3D meshing of stratigraphy models, visualization, and
the integration of GIS and groundwater modeling.

Surface Water Modeling

Current research in the area of surface water models include:

• Automatic generation of finite element meshes based on user specified size functions . 
  
• Automatic mesh editing/refinement based on solution data. This allows integration of the
  pre-processing phase with the numerical model. 
  
• Creation of two-dimensional numeric model from one-dimensional data. 
  
• Three dimensional graphics tools for visualization of results. 
  

Watershed Modeling

In the field of Watershed Modeling, the EMRL conducts research in the following areas: 

• Flood plain delineation 
  
• Spatial computation of hydrologic loss and rainfall parameters 
  
• Interfaces to several hydrologic models, including HEC-1, TR-20, F0601, TR-55, the
  Rational Method, and the National Flood Frequency method 
  
• Delineation of watersheds using TIN-based, Vector-based, and Grid-based methods