About

Dr Barnett has long experience of modelling water infrastructure projects worldwide, and in 2019 he provided technical reviews of international modelling in the WWDR 2020 “Water and Climate Change” report to the United Nations. He has been commissioned for feasibility modelling reviews by institutions such as the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the European Investment Bank. In New Zealand, completed projects include design of the 26km Tekapo canal with capacity of 120m3/s in generation mode and 60m3/s in pumped storage mode. He also designed control system flood rules for the Waikato River power cascade of eight dams, staged harbour development for the Port of Tauranga and Northport, and coastal flood management for Te Papa, the largest government building in the country. All these projects have relied on his progressive development of the AULOS hydraulic modelling system, software which now has registered users in 35 countries. He is the past chair of the Flood Risk Management Technical Committee of the IAHR. That Committee is now investigating weak points in international engineering practice for the management of river and coastal flood risks through climate change in the 21st century.

Career Type:

Scientist/Researcher/Academic

Organization Type:

Companies and Enterprises

Expertise Fields/Interests:

Numerical Analysis Methods Engineering, Applied and Computational Mathematics Numerical Modeling Computational Fluid Dynamics

Major Achievements:

Dr Barnett has published many papers on a fundamental review of flood modelling. This was originally undertaken for the design of hydropower canals in New Zealand to take sudden flow transitions of the order of hundreds of cumecs (m3/s). By introducing hypervolume expressions of physical conservation laws to merge traditional Bernoulli and St Venant analysis, he showed how finite difference methods produce inaccurate flood wave models under such transient conditions. The new finite hypervolume method was coded for 3D scalar numerical solutions, and validated for superior accuracy against full scale observations of hazardous waves in a range of canals, rivers and coastal inlets. One of these accuracy benchmarks applied to flood models in urban streams, as now published in the Resources Library available to IAHR members worldwide.