Sunny Yu

Biography

Songyan (Sunny) Yu is currently working as Lecturer in Water Engineering at Southern Cross University, with extensive research experience in hydrodynamic modelling, hydro-ecology of intermittent streams, and water resource management.

Sunny has work experience in local government and he used to work as Senior Hydraulic Engineer at Gold Coast City Council, developing and maintaining hydrological and hydraulic models of the city’s catchments and river systems and providing technical support for the City’s Flood Emergency Decision Support System with his expertise in flood modelling.

Sunny's work contributes to the following UN Sustainable Development Goals

Research

Before joining the City Council, Sunny used to work as Research Fellow at Australian Rivers Institute, Griffith University from 2019 to 2023 and has extensive research experience in applying coupled hydrodynamic and water quality models to inform lake management and enhance drinking water security under climate change. Sunny led a research project of assessing surface water availability across catchments to inform water security for freshwater biodiversity and human society under climate change. His research work also involved investigating the health risks of purified recycled water as a supplementary water source introduced to reservoirs through hydrodynamic modelling. His research has been used to support various water utilities including Seqwater, WaterNSW, and Hunter Water for climate change adaption and inform the Gold Coast City Council in nutrient reduction in a recreational lake.

Sunny is interested in developing tools to facilitate hydrodynamic model applications. He has published an R software package – “dycdtools” – that can help lake modellers automatically calibrate a widely used 1D lake model DYRESM-CAEDYM. The package also includes several visualisation functions to post-process lake model output for easy interpretation.