Dr. Adrian Harpold’s interests are in quantifying catchment and basin scale water and solute budgets and the linkages between hydrology, hydrochemistry, geomorphology, and ecology in montane forested systems. Mountain ecosystems are the major water source and carbon sink in western North America and subject to ongoing changes in climate and disturbance. Improved ecohydrological process understanding has the potential to improve local to global-scale water resource management in the 21st century.
My research program utilizes existing observation networks and new field observations to improve the ecohydrological process underpinnings of Earth systems models. My diverse interests and background has led to investigations of runoff generation mechanisms via hydrological tracers and models, as well as the partitioning of water to its various stores and fluxes. I am particularly interested in better linking the hydrological sub-disciplines of catchment and snow hydrology to improve our predictions of headwater catchment response to environmental change.