Ben Livneh
Associate Professor • Joint Appointment with CIRES • Director, Western Water Assessment
Hydrology, Water Resources & Environmental Fluid Mechanics • Mortenson Center in Global Engineering

Office: SEEC C251

Mailing Address:
CIRES
216 UCB, Boulder, CO 80309-0216

Education

  • PhD, Civil Engineering (emphasis in hydrology), University of Washington-Seattle, 2012
  • MESc, Civil Engineering, University of Western Ontario, 2006

Honors and Distinctions:

  • NASA New Investigator Award, 2018
  • Symposium Scholar, DISCCRS VIII: Dissertations Initiative for the Advancement of Climate Change Research, 2013
  • CIRES Visiting Fellowship Award, 2012

Professional Affiliations:

  • American Geophysical Union

Research Interests

  • Impacts of changing land cover and climate on water resources
  • Land surface modeling and the terrestrial water balance
  • Regionalization of land surface processes and parameters
  • Sediment transport

Recent Publications:

  1. F. Yao, B. Livneh, B. Rajagopalan. 2023: Earth’s large lakes are shrinking. TheScienceBreaker, 9(4). https://doi.org/10.25250/thescbr.brk774
  2. Williams, A.P., B. Livneh, K.A. McKinnon, W.D. Hansen, J.S. Mankin, B.I. Cook, J.E. Smerdon, A.M. Varuolo-Clarke, N.R. Bjarke, C.S. Juang, and D.P. Lettenmaier, 2022: Growing impact of wildfire on western United States water supply, Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, 119(10) e2114069119, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2114069119.
  3. Culler, E.S., *A.M. Badger, J.T. Minear, K.F. Tiampo, S. Zeigler, and B. Livneh, 2021: A Multi-sensor Evaluation of Precipitation Uncertainty for Landslide-triggering Storm Events, Hydrological Processes, 35(7), e14260, https://doi.org/10.1002/hyp.14260.
  4. Heldmyer, A.J., B. Livneh, B. Rajagopalan, and N. Molotch, 2021: Investigating the Relationship Between Peak Snow-Water Equivalent and Snow Timing Indices in the Western U.S. and Alaska, Water Resources Research, 57, e2020WR029395, https://doi.org/10.1029/2020WR029395.
  5. Abolafia-Rosenzweig, R., M. Pan, J.L. Zeng, and B. Livneh, 2021: A remotely sensed ensemble to observe the terrestrial water budget over major global river basins, Remote Sensing of Environment, 252, 112191, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2020.112191.
  6. Bjarke, N.R., B. Livneh, S. Elmendorf, N. Molotch, E. Hinckley, J. Morse, N. Emery, P. Johnson, and K. Suding, 2021: Catchment scale observations at the Niwot Ridge Long-Term Ecological Research site, Hydrological Processes, https://doi.org/10.1002/hyp.14320.
  7. Abolafia-Rosenzweig, R., *A.M. Badger, E.E. Small, and B. Livneh, 2020: A Continental-scale Soil Evaporation Dataset Derived from Soil Moisture Active Passive Satellite Drying Rates, Scientific Data, 7(1), 1-10, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-020-00748-z.
  8. Barsugli, J. J., A. Ray, B. Livneh, C. Dewes, A. Heldmyer, I. Rangwala, J. Guinnotte, and S. Torbit, 2020: Projections of mountain snowpack loss for wolverine denning elevations in the Rocky Mountains, Earth’s Future, 8(10), https://doi.org/10.1029/2020EF001537.
  9. Kampf, S., B. Gannon, C. Wilson, F. Saavedra, M. E. Miller, A. Heldmyer, B. Livneh, P. Nelson, and L. MacDonald, 2020: PEMIP: Post-fire Erosion Model Inter-comparison Project, Journal of Environmental Management, 268, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2020.110704.
  10. Livneh, B., and *A.M. Badger, 2020: Drought less predictable under declining future snowpack, Nature Climate Change, 10, 452–458, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-020-0754-8.
  11. Williams, A.P., E.R. Cook, J.E. Smerdon, B.I. Cook, R. Seager, J.T. Abatzoglou, K. Bolles, S.H. Baek, *A. Badger, and B. Livneh, 2020: Large contribution from anthropogenic warming to an emerging North American megadrought, Science, 368(6488), 314-318, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaz9600.