Ms. Cydzik specializes in the areas of water resources and hydrology. She has experience evaluating the hydrologic changes that occur in watersheds due to urban development and wildfire. In her thesis, Ms. Cydzik designed a hydrologic model of the City Creek Watershed in the San Bernardino Mountains using the Army Corps of Engineers HEC-HMS. The purpose of this study was to track the recovery of the City Creek Watershed following the 2003 Old Fire by modeling the watershed’s hydrologic response to rainfall events over three rainy seasons. In the City Creek case study, the model results showed evidence of some recovery following the end of the first rainy season and more extensive recovery was observed by the end of the third rainy season, which agrees with observations published in the literature.
Prior to joining Exponent, Ms. Cydzik was a graduate researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) studying watershed recovery following wildfires. While at UCLA, she also served as a Teaching Assistant for an undergraduate hydrologic design course.
Ms. Cydzik was a participant in the American Meteorological Society Summer Policy Colloquium in Washington, D.C. in June 2006. The Colloquium is an annual gathering designed to help create a foundation for improving the lines of communication among scientists, engineers, and policy makers.
Floodplain Management Performed screening level analysis of scour velocities and erosion potential in a river and its adjacent marsh environment to understand the potential for the creation of erosional or depositional areas based on known particle sizes and FEMA estimates of typical discharge velocities in the area.
Hazard Analysis and Mitigation Performed a review of watershed responses (peak discharges, debris flow potential) for areas burned during the October 2003 Old Fire in the San Bernardino Mountains, California.