M. Levent Kavvas
Professor
Civil & Environmental Engineering
2001 Engineering III
(530) 752-2518
Dr. Kavvas's areas of specialization include mathematical modeling of the integrated hydrologic-atmospheric processes at global, continental, country and watershed scales for the simulation and prediction of hydrologic water balances toward quantifying phenomena such as floods and droughts; mathematical modeling of hydrologic processes at regional, watershed and hillslope scales; investigations on the mathematical modeling of contaminant transport by inland surface waters, unsaturated flow and groundwater flow, and physical hydraulic modeling of environmental fluid flows.
Dr. Kavvas is the chief editor of ASCE Journal of Hydrologic Engineering, and associate editor for Korean Water Engineering Research journal. He has been associate editor for IAHS Hydrological Sciences Journal and Journal of Hydrology, and has served in the editorial boards of Advances in Water Resources and the Journal of Stochastic Hydrology and Hydraulics. He has served as chair of the IAHS (International Association of Hydrological Sciences) Macroscale Hydrologic Modeling Working Group, and as co-director of the UC Center for the Study of Hydroclimatology in the Pacific Rim. He is currently the vice-chair of IAHS Working Group in Theoretical and Experimental Hydrology at All Scales, and serves in several committees of ASCE.
Awards
Recipient of 2001 ASCE/EWRI Arid Lands Hydraulic Engineering Award, and 1999 ASCE Richard Torrens Award. Fulbright Scholar (1970-75), member of Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society (1973); listed in American Men and Women of Science (1998, 2002 editions), in Who's Who in Science and Engineering (2003-2004), in Who's Who in Engineering Education (2002), and in Marquis Who's Who in America (2000, 2001). Signed Science and Technology Agreements with Ministry of Construction (1990-2001) and with Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transportation (2002-) of Government of Japan for research collaboration in hydrology and hydrometeorology.
Publications
Some representative publications of Dr. Kavvas are as follows:
M.L.Kavvas
"Nonlinear hydrologic processes: conservation equations for determining their means and probability distributions"
ASCE Journal of Hydrologic Engineering, Vol. 8, No.2, 44-53, 2003.
M.L.Anderson, Z.Q.Chen, M.L.Kavvas, and A.Feldman
"Coupling HEC-HMS with atmospheric models for prediction of watershed runoff"
ASCE Journal of Hydrologic Engineering, Vol. 7, No.4, 312-318, 2002.
M.L.Kavvas
"General conservation equation for solute transport in heterogeneous porous media"
ASCE Journal of Hydrologic Engineering, Vol.6, No.4, 341-350, 2001.
M.L.Anderson, M.D.Mierzwa and M.L.Kavvas
"Probabilistic seasonal forecasts of droughts with a simplified coupled hydrologic-atmospheric model for water resources planning"
Stochastic Environmental Research and Risk Assessment, 14 (4-5), 263-274,2000.
Karakas,A. and M.L.Kavvas
"Conservation equations for groundwater velocity in general conditions"
ASCE Journal of Hydrologic Engineering, Vol.5, No.2, 206-216, 2000.
M.L.Kavvas
"On the coarse-graining of hydrologic processes with increasing scales"
Journal of Hydrology, 217, 191-202, 1999.
M.L.Kavvas, Z.Q.Chen, L.Tan, S.-T.Soong, A.Terakawa, J.Yoshitani, K.Fukami
"A regional-scale land surface parameterization based on areally-averaged
hydrologic conservation equations"
Hydrological Sciences Journal, 43(4), 611-631, 1998.
G. Tayfur and M.L.Kavvas
"Areally-averaged overland flow equations at hillslope scale"
Hydrological Sciences Journal, 43(3), 361-378, 1998.
E.C.Dogrul, M.L.Kavvas and Z.-Q.Chen
"Prediction of subsurface stormflow in heterogeneous sloping aquifers"
Journal of Hydrologic Engineering, 3(4), 258-267, 1998.
F.E.Horne and M.L.Kavvas
"Physics of the spatially averaged snowmelt process"
Journal of Hydrology, Vol.191, pp.179-207, 1997.
M.Nakatsugawa, M.Anderson and M.L.Kavvas
"A simplified climate model with combined atmospheric-hydrological processes"
Hydrological Sciences Journal, Vol.41, No.6, December 1996.
Z.-Q.Chen, R.S.Govindaraju, M.L.Kavvas
"Spatial averaging of unsaturated flow equations under infiltration conditions over areally heterogeneous fields : 1.Development of models"
Water Resources Research, Vol.30,No.2, pp.523-533, February,1994.
L. Bravar and M.L. Kavvas
"On the Physics of Droughts. I. A Conceptual Framework"
Journal of Hydrology, Vol. 129, pp. 281-297, December 1991.
L. Bravar and M.L. Kavvas
"On the Physics of Droughts. II. Analysis and Simulation of the Interaction of Atmospheric and Hydrologic Processes during Droughts"
Journal of Hydrology, Vol. 129, pp. 299-330, December 1991.