Full Title: "Urbanization, Water Resources and Lake Water Quality in the Seattle Region"

Course Objectives:

Focus and Goals:

This course will be run as a WORKSHOP to investigate the critical lake water quality management issues in the Lake Washington and Lake Sammamish watersheds. This will not be a lecture course, nor will there be any exams. We will tie into the framework provided by the hydrologic component of PRISM (Puget Sound Regional Synthesis Model) to explore how urbanization in the Seattle area will affect water quality through non-point source pollution and the operation of proposed sewage treatment facilities.

The first three weeks of this course will be spent reviewing the pertinent primary literature and reports. We will also have a series of presentations by local experts on these topics. The class will then identify key objectives (e.g. building a whole watershed P mass balance model, or a lake eutrophication simulation model) and key gaps in the current knowledge base. Then the class will break into groups of 4-6 students and each group will independently work on one of these problems for several weeks. These groups will meet with the course instructors at regular intervals and will report their results to the rest of the class every two weeks.