Amjad (MJ) Umari

Amjad "M.J." Umari, USGS ground water hydrologist in Denver Colorado in the Integrated Modeling & Prediction Division (IMPD) of the Water Mission Area (WMA), received his Ph.D. in civil engineering with emphasis on ground water flow and transport from Cornell University. For his dissertation, he wrote a computer program for parameter estimation of dispersivities using optimization techniques while being a research assistant. For his Master's Thesis at Cornell, he developed analytical solutions for infiltration while being a teaching assistant.

After completing his Ph.D. program, he became Assistant Professor of Fluid Mechanics and Hydrology at Old Dominion University in Virginia and held a summer faculty fellowship at the USGS headquarters in Reston.

He then spent 4 years as Project Chief in the Albuquerque, NM district office to apply a 3-dimensional geothermal code to the Valles Caldera geothermal field in the Jemez Mountains of Northern New Mexico.

Following that, he spent 3 years as Project Chief in the San Diego project office of the California district to determine the impact of septic tank effluent on the deep water table aquifer in the Mojave Desert.

From 1991 to 2010, Umari was Principal Investigator for conducting hydraulic and tracer tests to obtain hydraulic and transport parameters of the fractured tuff and alluvial saturated aquifers of southern Nevada as part of determining the suitability of Yucca Mountain as the nation's repository for spent nuclear fuel. During that time, Umari was the direct supervisor of GS-12 level hydrologists and a GS-12 level supervisory hydrologic technician and led them in highly complicated and challenging groundwater testing activities. Umari thus gained valuable management experience and handled difficult personnel situations. Umari also gained extensive experience in presenting and communicating his and his team's work at forums of various sizes ranging from large national technical meetings to meetings in small interactive settings.

After closure of the USGS Yucca Mountain Porject Branch in Oct 2010, and through 2011, Umari worked on: 1) Supporting the USGS National Research Program (NRP)’s Modeling of Watershed Systems (MOWS) Project and writing a Fortran module on Potential Evapotranspiration, 2) Supporting the CA WSC by reviewing reports and performing some Groundwater Specialist duties, and compiling “water-banking” numbers to be entered into the CA Central Valley MODFLOW Hydrologic Model (Groundwater Availability of the Central Valley Aquifer, California, Claudia Faunt, Editor), and 3) Supporting the Transport of Anthropogenic And Natural Contaminants (TANC) project’s Albuquerque basin MODFLOW and MT3D flow and transport [with Local Refinement] model and presenting modeling results at the American Water Association (AWRA)’s meeting in Albuquerque, NM in Nov 2011.

 In 2012 and 2013, Umari collaborated with Ken Kipp of the USGS NRP to extend the 2-dimensional USGS LVDA: Model-Layer Variable-Direction Horizontal Anisotropy method by Anderman and others (2002), implemented as a MODFLOW package, to three dimensions, in their stand-alone Fortran program referred to as 3D-VDA (3-D - Variable Direction Anisotropy). Umari presented this work at the Fall 2013 American Geophysical Union (AGU)’s 2013 Fall Meeting in December 2013.

From 2014 through October 2017, Umari was funded by the USGS Energy Mission Area to study the geologic evolution of underpressured (sub-hydrostatic) subsurface areas in Paleozoic aquifers extending from the Rockies to eastern Kansas. These underpressured zones are economically conducive to the injection of largely anthropogenic CO₂ in carbon-sequestration efforts. Umari collaborated with USGS Water and Energy Mission Areas’ scientists in creating a sequence of 9 MODFLOW models that represented the uplift, deposition, and erosion that would have occurred from 40 Ma to the present, culminating with modeled present-day hydraulic heads comparable to heads measured in the field. These heads delineate areas of sub- hydrostatic pressures economically conducive to CO2 sequestration. A journal article, Umari and others (2018) was published online on this modeling study: 

https://www.hindawi.com/journals/geofluids/2018/3765743/

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SELECTED PUBLICATIONS arranged chronologically for Umari ( Amjad Umari, sometimes listed as Amjad M.A. Umari, Amjad M.J. Umari, or M.J. Umari)

Umari, Amjad M.A., 1974, Analysis of two approximate solutions for the infiltration of water into a dry porous medium: Master of Science Thesis, Cornell University.

Umari, Amjad M.A., 1977, Identification of aquifer dispersivities in two dimensional, transient, groundwater contaminant transport: an optimization approach: Doctoral Dissertation, Cornell University.

Umari, Amjad, Willis, Robert, and Liu, Philip L-F., 1979, Identification of aquifer dispersivities in two-dimensional, transient groundwater contaminant transport: an optimization approach: Water Resources Research, v. 15, no. 4, pp. 815-831.

Umari, Amjad M.J. and Gorelick, Steven M., 1986a, The problem of complex eigensystems in the semianalytical solution for advancement of time in solute transport simulations: a new method using real arithmetic: Water Resources Research, vol. 22, no. 7, pp. 1149-1154.

Umari, Amjad M.J. and Gorelick, Steven M., 1986b, Evaluation of the matrix exponential for use in ground-water-flow and solute transport simulations: theoretical framework: U.S. Geological Survey Water Resources Investigations Report 86-4096, 33 p.

Umari, Amjad M.J. and Szeliga, T.L., 1989, Conversion and comparison of the mathematical, three-dimensional, finite-difference, ground-water flow model to the modular, three-dimensional, finite-difference, ground-water flow model for the Tesuque Aquifer system in northern New Mexico: U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report 89-26, 39 p.

Umari, Amjad M.J., Martin, Peter, Schroeder, R.A., Duell, L.F.W. Jr., and Fay, R.G., 1995, Potential for ground-water contamination from movement of wastewater through the unsaturated zone, Upper Mojave River Basin, California: U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report 93-4137, 83 p.

Umari, Amjad, M.A., 1996, An automated curve-matching approach to the analysis of convergent tracer tests: computer poster session at Fall 1996 Meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, Ca., poster no. H11B-7.

Geldon, A.L., Earle, J.D., and Umari, Amjad M.A., 1997, Determination of barometric efficiency and effective porosity, boreholes UE-25 c#1, UE-25 c#2, and UE-25 c#3, Yucca Mountain, Nye County, Nevada: U.S. Geological Survey Water-Resources Investigations Report 97-4098.

Geldon, A.L., Umari, Amjad M.A., Earle, J.D., Fahy, M.F., Gemmell, J.M., and Darnell, Jon, 1998, Analysis of a multiple-well interference test in Miocene tuffaceous rocks at the C-hole complex, May-June 1995, Yucca Mountain, Nye County Nevada: U.S. Geological Survey Water-Resources Investigations Report 97-4166.

Geldon, A.L., Umari, Amjad M.A., Earle, J.D., Fahy, M.F., Gemmell, J.M., and Darnell, Jon, 2002, Results of hydraulic tests in Miocene tuffaceous rocks at the C-hole Complex, 1995 to 1997, Yucca Mountain, Nye County, Nevada: U.S. Geological Survey Water-Resources Investigations Report 02-4141.

Umari, M.J., 2003a, Linked Analytical Solutions Method (fourth method), in: Reimus, Paul, Umari, M.J., Roback, Robert, Earle, John, Darnell, Jon, and Farnham, Irene, 2003, Estimates of ambient ground-water velocity in the alluvium south of Yucca Mountain, Nye County, Nevada, from single- well tracer tests, International High Level Radioactive Waste Management Conference and Exhibition, Las Vegas Nevada, March 31-April 2, 2003.

Umari, M.J., 2003b, Papadopulos analysis optimized with PEST, in: Eddebarh, A.A., James, S.C., Umari, M.J., and Reimus, P.W., 2003, Saturated zone anisotropy near the C-Wells complex, EOS Trans. AGU, 84(46), Fall Meet. Suppl., Abstract H21D-0841.

Umari, M.J., Shapiro, Allen, Reimus, Paul, Kwicklis, Ed, Earle, John, and Fahy, Mike, 2005, Large-scale natural gradient tracer test: in Office of Science and Technology and International (OST&I) Annual Report [for] 2005, U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, Washington, D.C., 220 p.

Umari, Amjad, Earle, J.D., and Fahy, M.F., 2006, Analysis of Single-hole and Cross-hole Tracer Tests Conducted at the Nye County Early Warning Drilling Program Well [22] Complex, Nye County, Nevada: Proceedings of the 11th International High-Level Radioactive Waste Management Conference (IHLRWM), April 30-May 4, 2006, Las Vegas, Nevada; pp. 307-314.

Umari, Amjad; Fahy, M.F.; Earle, J.D.; and Tucci, Patrick, 2008, Conservative tracer tests in the Bullfrog, Tram, and Prow Pass tuffs, 1996 to 1998, Yucca Mountain, Nye County, Nevada: U.S. Geological Survey Scientific Investigations Report 2007-5280, 40 p.

Umari, M.J., Nelson, P.H., Fridrich, C.J., and LeCain, G.D., 2018, Simulating the evolution of fluid underpressures in the Great Plains, by incorporation of tectonic uplift and tilting, with a groundwater flow model: Geofluids, v. 2018, 30 p. Available at:  https://www.hindawi.com/journals/geofluids/2018/3765743/