Mikhail Smilovic
Research Scholar
Water Security Research Group
Biodiversity and Natural Resources Program
Biography
Dr. Mikhail Smilovic is a Research Scholar with the IIASA Water (WAT) program, where he is investigating issues related to water and food security through simulations and stakeholder-driven model development.Humans influence the pattern of how water moves within the hydrological cycle. This includes collecting, managing, and distributing water from rainfall, rivers, reservoirs, and groundwater aquifers. This water then satisfies agricultural, domestic, and industrial water interests. Simulating the water cycle in managed regions to address questions of water security necessitates including certain processes related to human interactions within the water cycle. Simulating at finer resolutions offers both the opportunity and challenge of including human-integrated processes that at coarser resolutions are either absorbed into other processes, not possible, or not relevant, while at higher resolutions are necessary to sufficiently represent the system.
Dr. Smilovic is further developing the hydrological model CWatM created at IIASA, increasing the resolution and improving representations of human interactions within the water cycle.
Last update: 30 SEP 2020
Publications
Mohammadnezhad, M., Rezaee, A., & Smilovic, M. (2026). Multi-timescale streamflow projections in human-regulated basins of southwest Iran using CWatM and explainable machine learning. Journal of Hydrology: Regional Studies 66 e103534. 10.1016/j.ejrh.2026.103534.
Artuso, S., Politti, E., Burek, P. , Tramberend, S. , Smilovic, M. , & Kahil, T. (2026). Crop Water Use and Future Irrigation Scenarios within a Safe Operating Space Framework in the Danube Basin. DOI:10.5194/egusphere-egu26-13157. In: EGU General Assembly 2026, 03 May - 08 May 2026, Vienna.
Sun, M., Tangdamrongsub, N., Sun, Y., Dong, J., Sutanudjaja, E., & Smilovic, M. (2026). Assessing and optimizing high-resolution global river streamflow estimates with triple collocation analysis. Journal of Hydrology 669 e135122. 10.1016/j.jhydrol.2026.135122.
Wang, A., Klassert, C.J.A., Karutz, R., Smilovic, M. , Kahil, T. , Burek, P. , Zhu, Y., Zozmann, H., Klauer, B., Küblöck, K., Omann, I., Figueroa, A.J., Wada, Y., Naylor, R., & Gorelick, S.M. (2026). Drought-Driven Water Insecurity in an Emerging Indian Megacity: A Coupled Multi-Agent Systems Approach for Policy Evaluation. Earth's Future 14 (3) e2025EF007976. 10.1029/2025EF007976.
Reinecke, R., Akhter, T., Bäthge, A., Dietrich, R., Gnann, S., Gosling, S.N., Grogan, D., Hartmann, A., Kollet, S., Kumar, R., Lammers, R., Liu, S., Liu, Y., Moosdorf, N., Naz, B., Nazari, S., Orazulike, C., Pokhrel, Y., Schewe, J., Smilovic, M. , Strokal, M., Thiery, W., Wada, Y., Zuidema, S., & de Graaf, I. (2026). The ISIMIP groundwater sector: a framework for ensemble modeling of global change impacts on groundwater. Geoscientific Model Development 19 (1) 523-542. 10.5194/gmd-19-523-2026.