Environmental Internship Program - 2023 Booklet

Jamie Kim ’24
CIVIL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING
Certificate: Applications of Computing
WATER AND THE
ENVIRONMENT
102
PROJECT TITLE
The Interface of Hydrology
and Machine Learning:
Generating Better
Information for Decisionmakers
and Educating the
Decision-makers of the
Future
ORGANIZATION(S)
Integrated GroundWater
Modeling Center (IGWMC),
Department of Civil
and Environmental
Engineering, Princeton
University
LOCATION(S)
Princeton, New Jersey
MENTOR(S)
Reed Maxwell,
William and Edna Macaleer
Professor of Engineering
and Applied Science,
Professor of Civil and
Environmental Engineering
and the High Meadows
Environmental Institute;
Lisa Gallagher, Education
and Outreach Specialist,
IGWMC, Department of Civil
and Environmental
Engineering
Providing accurate information about our
water sources is important for future decisionmakers
to make wise and sustainable plans
concerning water management. However,
due to climate change, future environmental
conditions have become further unpredictable,
making it challenging to understand our water
supplies. Using both physics-based and datadriven
modeling in combination is essential
for predicting conditions, as both modeling
methods have advantages and disadvantages.
To inform the integration of these methods, I
analyzed the correlations between pumping
data and climate condition variables and
determined how groundwater pumping affects
water table depth. I focused on implementing a
machine learning, data-driven model that used
a regression-enhanced random forest method
to estimate water table depth in New Jersey. In
addition, as part of the educational aspect of
the internship, I helped teach at The Watershed
Institute’s Watershed Academy for High School
Students where I introduced the idea of pattern
recognition and discussed the importance of data
quantity and quality for training, all of which are
fundamental to machine learning. Through this
experience, I learned various practical skills in
machine learning and data analysis which I hope
to utilize for my senior thesis and other future
work.