Laura Condon

About

Laura Condon is a faculty member in the Hydrology & Atmospheric Sciences department at the University of Arizona. Her research focuses on large scale groundwater surface water interactions and water sustainability at regional to continental scales. She is involved in computational and numerical modeling, particularly related to water resources and environmental systems. Her work aims to address water sustainability challenges through advanced modeling techniques and interdisciplinary approaches.

Research topics

• Environmental science
• Geology
• Computer Science
• Ecology
• Geography
• Geotechnical engineering
• Meteorology
• Cartography
• Environmental engineering
• Physics

Selected publications

• Evapotranspiration depletes groundwater under warming over the contiguous United States

  Nature Communications · 2020 · 415 citations

  A warmer climate increases evaporative demand. However, response to warming depends on water availability. Existing earth system models represent soil moisture but simplify groundwater connections, a primary control on soil moisture. Here we apply an integrated surface-groundwater hydrologic model to evaluate the sensitivity of shallow groundwater to warming across the majority of the US. We show that as warming shifts the balance between water supply and demand, shallow groundwater storage can…

  DOI

• Global Groundwater Modeling and Monitoring: Opportunities and Challenges

  Water Resources Research · 2021 · 273 citations

  Abstract Groundwater is by far the largest unfrozen freshwater resource on the planet. It plays a critical role as the bottom of the hydrologic cycle, redistributing water in the subsurface and supporting plants and surface water bodies. However, groundwater has historically been excluded or greatly simplified in global models. In recent years, there has been an international push to develop global scale groundwater modeling and analysis. This progress has provided some critical first steps. Sti…

  DOI

• Simulating coupled surface–subsurface flows with ParFlow v3.5.0: capabilities, applications, and ongoing development of an open-source, massively parallel, integrated hydrologic model

  Geoscientific model development · 2020 · 157 citations

  Abstract. Surface flow and subsurface flow constitute a naturally linked hydrologic continuum that has not traditionally been simulated in an integrated fashion. Recognizing the interactions between these systems has encouraged the development of integrated hydrologic models (IHMs) capable of treating surface and subsurface systems as a single integrated resource. IHMs are dynamically evolving with improvements in technology, and the extent of their current capabilities are often only known to t…

  DOI

• Unravelling groundwater–stream connections over the continental United States

  Nature Water · 2025-01-06 · 29 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  Groundwater is a critical component of the terrestrial water cycle, yet the distance and depth of its connections with streamflow remain unquantified at large scale. Here we conducted a backward-particle-tracking simulation across the continental United States. We quantified the lateral length and vertical depth of groundwater flow discharged to streams as baseflow. Our simulation results suggest that water may travel longer distances underground before emerging in a stream than previously thoug…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Declining Reservoir Reliability and Increasing Reservoir Vulnerability: Long‐Term Observations Reveal Longer and More Severe Periods of Low Reservoir Storage for Major United States Reservoirs

  Geophysical Research Letters · 2024-08-22 · 19 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Hydrological drought is a pervasive and reoccurring challenge in managing water resources. Reservoirs are critical for lessening the impacts of drought on water available for many uses. We use a novel and generalized approach to identify periods of unusually low reservoir storage—via comparisons to operational rule curves and historical patterns—to investigate how droughts affect storage in 250 reservoirs across the conterminous U.S. (CONUS). We find that the maximum amount of water sto…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: Sustainability in the Food-Energy-Water nexus; integrated hydrologic modeling of tradeoffs between food and hydropower in large scale Chinese and US basins

  NSF · $257k · 2018–2023

• CAREER: The Role of Groundwater Storage in Earth System Dynamics; Research to Improve Understanding of Current Hydrologic Regimes and Future Climate Response

  NSF · $495k · 2020–2025

• Collaborative Research: Framework: Software: NSCI : Computational and data innovation implementing a national community hydrologic modeling framework for scientific discovery

  NSF · $700k · 2018–2024

Frequent coauthors

• R. M. Maxwell

  Princeton University

  135 shared

• Jun Zhang

  Nanyang Technological University

  30 shared

• Hoang Tran

  Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

  28 shared

• Jennie C. Steyaert

  16 shared

• Stefan Kollet

  Forschungszentrum Jülich

  16 shared

• Luis De La Fuente

  University of Arizona

  15 shared

• D. Tijerina

  Princeton University

  13 shared

• Agnès Ducharne

  12 shared

Education

• PhD Hydrolgy

  Colorado School of Mines

  2015

• MS Hydrology

  Colorado School of Mines

  2012

• B.S. Environmental Engineering

  Columbia University

  2008

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