MOST SIGNIFICANT RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS

Summary: Activities and Academic Contributions – Overall

Since joining the academic community at McGill in 1987, I have established a productive and rewarding research program. I have worked primarily in the applied sciences, specializing in groundwater and thermal interactions, probabilistic methods, and high-resolution numerical simulations. Progress has been made in all these areas. Publications have been targeted to Geophysical Research Letters, Journal of Geophysical Research, Canadian Geotechnical Journal, Water Resources Research, Journal of Contaminant Hydrology, Geophysical Journal International, Geophysics, Ground Water, Advances In Water Resources and other leading-edge journals (internationally) in the groundwater and earth science fields. All of the above journals have high impact factors, and my works have been widely cited with an average citation per item of about 16. 

• Recognition as a world-leader in groundwater and low-temperature geothermal interactions.
• Work with Leslie Smith in 1988 on thermal and hydrologic inversion is considered a benchmark in studies of heat and groundwater flow and has been referred to as “pioneering work”.
• Numerous invitations for speaking at conferences and workshops. These include the American Geophysical Union, the National Ground Water Association and the Geological Society of America, as well as other universities and private organizations.

a) Work in the area of groundwater and heat transport.

During the last NSERC funding period, Grant Ferguson and I have investigated the anomalous thermal regime beneath Winnipeg, Canada. This “heat island” effect makes it difficult to resolve information on past climates and in some areas the temperature increases will also have an impact of geothermal energy resources. A recent, comprehensive study¹⁷, has shown that most open-loop geothermal developments in the Winnipeg area will inevitably experience temperature increases due to heat transport occurring between the injection and withdrawal wells in an individual system. This work is of particular interest to the Winnipeg’s Waverly West development. Work in temperature surveys and methods to determine past climatic changes from boreholes was the subject of published works with Ferguson^14,15 and also Jim Hendry, at the University of Saskatchewan¹².

• Work¹¹ with Grant Ferguson has been well received not only internationally but by Manitoba Hydro, and the local engineering community; citations in journals.
• The American Geophysical Union, selected the above paper as one of their featured articles.
• Prominent mention of Ferguson and Woodbury’s works in Banks’ (2009) textbook on Geothermics and by British Geothermal expert, Paul Younger.

b) Improvements in Atmosphere/Land Surface Interactions.

One of my long-term goals is to develop an efficient hydrological and numerical coupling of the land surface with groundwater flow, and also with the atmosphere through accurate descriptions of the lower boundary conditions. We succeeded in benchmarking our improved version of the Canadian Land Surface Scheme SABAE-HW, and inter-comparisons to other models such as HYDRUS-1D and HELP3 ensure the applicability and viability of our code¹⁰. Eventually, I would like to move ahead with numerical programming towards the ultimate coupling of our groundwater code with the Canadian GCM, in order to allow for more accurate exchanges of water and energy fluxes between the atmosphere and the earth surface. The overall objective is to assist other research efforts in trying to understand, assess and quantify the evolution of drought. Also, the future inclusion of human practices in each of the model components (agriculture, pumping, wastes, and so on) will allow us to study the influences on climate variability and change. As a result of interactions and synergies created within the above network, other publications have been targeted to understand the evolution of climate in the north of Canada⁹

• Ph.D. candidate Alireza Hejazi recently won of an outstanding poster presentation award at the (2011) annual Canadian Water Network conference as a result of his contributions to the SABAE code noted above.

c) Information-based Inversion and Stochastic Hydrology.

I am equally well known for my work with Tad Ulrych (UBC) in probabilistic methods (Bayesian, Maximum Entropy, Minimum Relative Entropy, MRE)¹. One of my most recent efforts was a theoretical piece comparing Bayes to MRE as a tribute to the late Dr. Kapur⁶. Note that there is a large degree of uncertainty in the measured values of fundamental flow and transport parameters and the development of methods assigning probability distributions to these parameters is extremely useful, and crucial. Leading researchers in the field routinely refer to my work. Since mathematical inversion is the cornerstone-problem in geophysics, the impact of these works has been high. For example, with my research team, I have successfully used these information-based techniques to effectively image the Edwards Aquifer in Texas¹³. The developed transmissivity field was adopted by the USGS in their most recent model of the aquifer. This is a strategically important aquifer in South Central Texas that is the sole source of water supply for San Antonio.

• I was invited to write a chapter in an AGU monograph series on data integration. This chapter focused on combining thermal and hydrologic methods in groundwater (see Woodbury, 2007; see also¹⁶) .
• Contributions to the development of MRE and Bayes have been prominently featured in textbooks by Rubin (2003), and Ulrych and Sacchi (2005).
• An earlier paper with Tad Ulrych in 2001 on Bayes has been widely referred to and cited in the geophysical literature.
• Woodbury and Sudicky (1991) is considered a benchmark paper in Groundwater Hydrology, and has become highly cited (over 171 times to date).
  

1. Woodbury, A.D., Comment on: Entropy theory for derivation of infiltration equations by V.P. Singh, (2010), Water Resources Research, 48, W08802, doi:10.1029/2012WR012322, 2012.

2. Olfman, M., Woodbury, A.D. and J. Bartley, Effects of depth and material property variations on the ground temperature response to heating by a deep vertical ground heat exchanger in purley conductive media, submitted to Geothermics, September 2012. CRD

3. Assefa, K. A. and A.D. Woodbury, Model evaluation using field data for transient spatially varied groundwater recharge modeling, submitted to Water Resources Research, June 2012. SRO

4. Hejazi, A., Woodbury, A.D., Loukili, Y. and O.O. Akinremi, Coupling a Nitrogen Transport and Transformation Model with the Land Surface Scheme SABAE-HW and Application to the Canadian Prairies, submitted to Water Resources Research, June 2012.DRI, CWN

5. Jiang, Y. and A.D. Woodbury, Full-Bayesian, simple zoned inversion and transmissivity assessment of the Edwards Aquifer, Texas, USA, Managing Groundwater and the Environment, Proc. ModelCARE 2009, Wuhan, China, IAHS Publ. 341, 2011. DG, SWRI

6. Woodbury, A.D., Minimum relative entropy, Bayes and Kapur, Geop. J. Int., 185(1), 181-189, 2011. DG

7. Hejazi, A. and A.D. Woodbury, Evaluation of SABAE-HW model in simulating snow depth, soil temperature, and soil moisture within the BOREAS field site, Saskatchewan, Atmosphere-Oceans, v. 1, 1-13, 2011. DRI, CWN

8. Ulrych, T.J. and A.D. Woodbury, An Occam's razor view of the lead-lag dispute in global warming,  The Leading Edge; v. 28; no. 8; p. 914-917; doi: 10.1190/1.3192838, 2009. DG

9. Woodbury, A.D., H. Bhuyian, Hanisak, J. and O.O. Akinremi, Observations of northern latitude ground-surface and surface-air temperatures, Geophys. Res. Lett., 36, 7, doi:10.1029/2009GL037400, 2009. DG, DRI

10. Loukili, Y.,  Woodbury, and K. Snelgrove, SABAE-HW – An enhancement of the water balance prediction in the Canadian Land Surface Scheme, Vadose Zone J.,  7, 865-877, 2008. DRI

11. Ferguson, G.A.G. and A.D. Woodbury, The urban heat island in the subsurface, Geop Res. Lett. , 34, L23713, doi:10.1029/2007GL032324, 2007. DG, CRD

12. Hendry, M.J. and A.D. Woodbury, Clay aquitards as archives of Holocene paleoclimate: ¹⁸O and Thermal Profiling, Ground Water, 45(6), 683-691, 2007. DG, CWN

13. Painter, S., Woodbury A.D., and Y. Jiang, Transmissivity Estimation for Highly Heterogeneous Aquifers: Comparison of Three Methods Applied to the Edwards Aquifer, Hydrogeology Journal, 15(2), 315-331, 2007. SWRI

14. Ferguson, G.A.G., Beltrami, H. and A.D. Woodbury, Perturbation of Ground Surface Temperature Reconstructions by Groundwater Flow?, Geophysics. Res. Lett., Vol. 33, No. 13, L13708, 10.1029/2006GL026634, 2006. DG, CRD

15. Woodbury, A.D. and G.A.G. Ferguson, Ground surface paleotemperature reconstruction by information measures and empirical Bayes, Geop. Res. Let. Vol 33, DOI:10.1029/2005GL025243, 2006. DG

16. Jiang, Y. and A.D. Woodbury, A full-Bayesian approach to the inverse problem for steady state groundwater flow and heat transport, Geophysical Journal International 167 (2), 1053-1053. doi: 10.1111/ j.1365-246X.2006.03254., 2006.

Ferguson, G.A.G. and A.D. Woodbury, Observed thermal pollution and post-development simulations of low-temperature geothermal systems in Winnipeg, Canada, Hydrogeology Journal, 14(7), 1206-1215, 2006. DG, CRD