Jiyong Lee is an R&D Associate Staff scientist in Water Resource Science and Engineering group within the Environmental Science Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). His research focuses on understanding the physical mechanisms of hydrodynamics and hydrology in rivers and coastal regions, as well as quantifying the impacts of future environmental conditions on these processes in the coming decades. To address research questions, he employs physical laboratory experiments, analytical and numerical modeling, large-scale geospatial data from observations, global climate models, and remote sensing.
At ORNL, he leads projects funded by Water Power Technology Office (WPTO) of the Department Of Energy (DOE) on reservoir sedimentation. The main goal of these projects is to quantify the capacity loss of reservoirs due to sedimentation under present and future climate conditions across the contiguous United States (CONUS). This work leverages bathymetric survey, remote sensing data, and coupled hydrologic, reservoir sedimentation, and hydromorphodynamic models. He also contributes to a Department of Defense (DoD)-funded project assessing future flood risk under future climate scenarios using a Two-dimensional Runoff Inundation Toolkit for Operational Needs (TRITON), an open-source and GPU-accelerated flooding model. In addition, he is developing a framework for assessing marine energy resources in the United States.