Profile

Dr. Khakbaz brings a unique and valuable skillset with wide-ranging expertise in water distribution systems, sewer collection systems, hydraulic and hydrologic modeling, and GIS. She has the theoretical background to quickly identify hydraulic-related problems and the real-world experience to know what methods and tools can be applied. She has extensive experience in advanced water resources issues including hydraulics modeling for transmission lines or distribution systems, steady state and extended period simulation model calibration, hydrologic modeling, sewer collection system modeling, rainfall-runoff analysis, watershed(basin) delineation, distributed hydrologic modeling, river/channel routing, application of GIS and remote sensing in watershed modeling and analysis, and processing data using GIS. She is proficient with InfoWater, WaterCAD/WaterGEMS, SewerGEMS, InfoWorks ICM and EPANET.

As a Research Associate at Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory, she worked in the Climate, Ocean, and Solid Earth Sciences group to evaluate the hydrologic impacts of changes in land cover, and particularly forest removal, on the characteristics of drought in China using a meso-scale hydrologic model named Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC). Her background also includes work with the Center for Hydrometeorology and Remote Sensing (CHRS) to develop a semi-distributed hydrologic model using SAC-SMA (lumped rainfall-runoff model of the US National Weather Service) as the water balance component and Kinematic Wave as the river routing component.