This award supports a "US-Korea Workshop on Riverbank Filtration Performance Under Extreme Environmental Conditions". The workshop will be held in Seoul, Korea, in November 2005. The principal investigator is Chittaranjan Ray, of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Hawaii. Korean counterpart is Dr. Kyu-Hong Ahn, principal research scientist in the Water Enviroment and Remediation Center, of the Korean Institute of Science and Technology (KIST). KIST is involved in a pilot riverbank filtration system along the Tancheon River (a tributary of the Han River) that flows through the city of Seoul, where the quality and flow variations in the river water are significant over the year. The workshop participants will brainstorm the feasibility of riverbank filtration under extreme environmental settings and discuss what types of research strategies must be taken to monitor and evaluate the performance of such systems once they are built.
The nine participants from the U.S.,(including one Ph.D. candidate), and six scheduled speakers from Korea show a good balance between senior and more junior investigators, a mix of relevant research specialties, and a good range of institutions in the US and also in Korea. Several Korean graduate students from KIST and Yeungnam University will also attend.
In the decades ahead, usable drinking water is a resource that will become increasingly scarce and valuable in this country, as in the world. The U.S. hydrological community and water resource managers can benefit from the experience of the Korean pilot riverbank filtration system, which can provide data on performance and lessons learned in extreme conditions which may not occur so frequently in the U.S.
