Dr. Jina Yin: Predicting groundwater pollution for water sustainability

The leaderette: We feel very delighted to welcome Dr. Jina Yin to join the YICODE team. Dr. Yin is an experienced researcher in numerical simulation of hydrological systems. His research also focuses on hydrometeorology, land-atmosphere interactions and extreme drought/flood events.

In December 2013, a blue “artery”, the east route of the South-to-North Water Diversion, set off from Yangzhou on the northern shore of the Yangtze to deliver water northward along the Grand Canal up to Tianjin. The route passes my hometown on the shore of Weishan Lake — Jining of Shandong Province. Weishan Lake is one of the Nansi (Southern Four) Lakes, four connected lakes to the southwest of the Province. However, this area is under severe threat of enduring drought, groundwater over-exploitation and water pollution. Though water diversion eased the tension between socio-economic development and ecological environment protection, ensuring both economic and ecological wellbeing still needs the focus on aquatic ecology, water pollution control and water sustainability. This also fits very well into the global theme defined in the IHP-VIII 2014-2021 Strategic Plan — Water Security: Addressing Local, Regional and Global Challenges.

My research focuses on groundwater under changing environment, analyzing groundwater dynamic evolution driven by both natural and human factors, and evaluating the risk of surface water pollution on groundwater environment through revealing surface water-groundwater interaction. Groundwater over-exploitation has caused seawater intrusion in some coastal areas in China, leading to a series of ecological, environmental and geological issues, especially in water-scarce areas. Preventing seawater intrusion still faces great unknown challenges. Therefore, reliable seawater intrusion prediction under complex hydrogeological conditions to inform suitable counter-strategies against pollution is of great practical significance. To better solve these problems, my research aims to combine hydrodynamics, statistics, machine learning and optimization methods to improve the accuracy of groundwater pollution prediction, and quantify the impact of uncertainty factors on water resources decision-making, which thereby provides scientific support for tailored protection.

I am thrilled to start my new position at the Yangtze Institute for Conservation and Development, and work with the experts in this field. I am more than willing to contribute my expertise to social economic development and ecological protection of the Yangtze River Basin.

For more information about Dr. Yin please refer to her personal page