I am a senior at NCSSM who came to watershed science walking Crabtree Creek near my home in Raleigh. At NC State University I develop an Elastic Net regression model for road-level flash-flood prediction in the Raleigh metro, one of the first to resolve flood estimates at the individual-road scale by fusing rainfall, topography, and impervious-cover data. That work directly inspired GRIME: Aarush and I began asking what else free public data and a browser could solve, and the debris-siting idea grew from there. I plan to study environmental engineering and business; outside school I volunteer, visit the beach, and do nature photography.
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Manager for Stockholm Junior Water Prize
Alia Baidoun
2026•Soham Kela
GRIME: Garbage River Interception and Modeling Engine. A Hydrologically Grounded, Equity-Weighted Geospatial Optimization Framework for Siting Stationary Debris Interceptors on Small Urban Waterways
Every rainstorm turns a small urban creek into a conveyor belt of plastic that rides the current to the sea. Cities want to catch it, but the engineering studies that pick a single boom location routinely cost six figures and take most of a year. We built GRIME to shrink that gap: a free browser tool that scores every meter of any stream a user draws on a map. It runs a D8 flow model on USGS 3DEP ten-meter elevation data, then blends 27 parameters spanning litter generation, hydrologic transport, downstream ecological and environmental-justice impact, and deployment feasibility into a two-level weighted score, cross-checked against Manning’s equation and stress-tested with a 10,000-iteration Dirichlet Monte-Carlo run. Applied to Ellerbe Creek, GRIME…
