Seth Westra

Biography

Seth is an academic and chartered professional engineer with 13 years of postgraduate experience across academia and industry, with expertise extreme in rainfall and flood risk estimation, hydrological modelling, water resources planning and management, and climate change impact assessments. He leads the University of Adelaide “Water Systems” research group in the School of Civil, Environmental and Mining Engineering, and chairs the Australian Energy and Water Exchanges (OzEWEX) committee on trends and extremes in Australian natural hazards. He has contributed to several chapters in Australian Rainfall and Runoff, and has won numerous awards including joint winner of the Water Industry Alliance “Minister’s Award for Excellence in Water Sustainability” for a project on assessing the risk of climate change on Adelaide’s water security, and the Australian Institute of Policy and Science “Tall Poppy” award.

Research Interest

The overarching aim of my research is to develop scientifically defensible solutions to a range of practical water resources problems. My recent research has centered on solving the following three problems: Quantifying the impacts of climate change and variability on Australian and international water resources, including on floods and drought; Developing flood estimation methods to handle complex multi-causal floods in urban, estuarine and rural catchments; and Improving hydrological (rainfall-runoff) models to better understand the role of data errors and non-stationarity, and quantifying prediction uncertainty