I grew up in one of North America’s great snow belts…and started my career in Buffalo NY So, that background and my fascination with sediment transport primes curiosity in ice transport. I’m sure my ice friends would cringe at this, but I sometimes call ice transport as upside down sediment transport. But despite the symmetry of ice and sediment transport, they are separate, complicated, disciplines with little overlapping expertise. Which is why its remarkable, that this episode’s guest is...
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I grew up in one of North America’s great snow belts…and started my career in Buffalo NY So, that background and my fascination with sediment transport primes curiosity in ice transport. I’m sure my ice friends would cringe at this, but I sometimes call ice transport as upside down sediment transport. But despite the symmetry of ice and sediment transport, they are separate, complicated, disciplines with little overlapping expertise. Which is why its remarkable, that this episode’s guest is...
Dr. Pierre Julien joined the Colorado State faculty almost 40 years ago, where he worked at CSU’s Engineering Research Center and Hydraulics laboratory. His book, Erosion and Sedimentation, is one of my most common references, and several of the algorithms we have in HEC-RAS (particularly for mud and debris flows) come directly from this text. But while Dr. Julien’s textbook includes as many partial differential equations and tensors as any other hydraulics text – maybe more – it...
We’re kicking this season off with one of the most prolific researchers in River Science. Dr. Ellen Wohl is a Fluvial Geomorphologist at Colorado State’s Warner College of Natural Resources. As we will discuss, Dr. Wohl has explored and studied rivers on 6 continents (so far). But she has also focused on river processes in the Colorado front range for more than 20 years, Turning up some important insights from both these scales. I’m not sure if Dr. Wohl leads the fluvial res...
The peer review process can feel like hazing to a new (or not-so-new) river scientist. Many excellent practitioners are learning from their rivers every day, but it can feel like if it doesn't get into peer review, it doesn't "count." So we separated this short segment from my conversation with Dr. Amy East, the Editor-in-Chief of AGU's Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface (and >10 years experience editing high impact journals) to provide a little primmer on how to ne...
When HEC hired me to add sediment transport to HEC-RAS almost 20 years ago now, I inherited a set of sediment transport functions that were mostly developed in the early to mid 20th century. These were – and continue to be – important equations.But when I sat down with the RAS team To talk about the new science I was excited to include in a river mechanics model.I pulled out the same binder I brought to this interview We are wrapping up our third season of the podcast, and our...
tDr. Power is a food web ecologist at UC Berkeley, where she leads the Power lab which has compiled careful, long term data sets in the Angelo Reserve in Northern CA.In addition to her early work, in Panama and the Ozarks - which we touch on briefly - Dr. Power’s multi-decadal data sets on the Eel River, have yielded remarkable findings about how food webs function in gravel bed rivers…and spoiler alert, it sometimes involves the sorts of things we tend to talk about here…like the grave...
Dr Alain Recking has quantified gravel bed transport with just about all the tools available to our discipline.In addition to substantial field work- Dr. Recking has done some important and influential flume experiments.We have talked and will talk about hiding and armoring quite a bit in this podcast, because they are difficult ideas, that are hard to measure and simulate, and critical to gravel bed processes.But Dr. Recking’s contributions to this vertical sorting conversation destabi...
A couple years ago, my agency asked me to write some guidance on sediment modeling, so, I reached out to the morphological modelers I knew, and particularly the model developers who write the morphological model code other people use.I asked them about the common failure modes they have seen and best practices they teach, and realized we had all essentially spent a decade or two, learning the same principles. So when the US federal agencies held their periodic Federal interagency sedimen...
I’ve heard people call Tony the godfather of Sediment Transport Modeling and - as you’ll hear in our conversation - he very well may be the first person to use a computer to answer an engineering scale sediment question.But most people about my age and older, know Tony for developing the first generalized sediment model. He was part of the original team here at the Hydrologic Engineering Center (HEC) where he developed HEC6, a 1D sediment transport model that was industry standard for d...
Dr. Jim Selegean is the Sediment Transport Specialist at the Corps Detroit District where he studies the rivers and sediment loads into the great lakes as well as inland costal processes. He is also a professor at Wayne State in Detroit. And that joint position has helped him mentor many young scientists and engineers throughout the years, geomorphically trained Hydraulic engineers who not only currently populate the Detroit district but also includes what we call the Detroit diasp...
Dr. Astrid Blom is a professor Civil Engineering & Geosciences at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands is perhaps best known for her recent reach and rive scale work, modeling hundreds of kilometers, sometimes for hundreds or thousands of years. These models explore the long-term equilibrium state of river responses to human modifications and the alternate potential futures associated with different climate change scenarios and management practices. Most of her rec...
In the previous episode, we talked to Dr. Marcelo Garcia about the astonishing compilation of sediment science he edited, the ASCE Sedimentation Manual. In this episode, we turn to some of his work, covering a wide range of topics, but landing for a while on sedimentation hazards including mud and debris flows, the Bulle Effect, and two transport paradigms (the Bagnold vs the Einstein approaches). Dr. Garcia is professor at the University of Illinois-Urbana and the director ...
Dr. Marcelo Garcia holds an endowed chair in Hydraulics at the University of Illinois-Urbana – where he has taught for more than thirty years, and runs the remarkable Ven Te Chow hydraulic and sediment laboratory. His award page reads like a who’s-who of the Legends in our field. These include but are not limited to:The Einstein Award, the Rouse Award, and the Yalin lifetime achievement award.And he is a Distinguished member of the American Society of Civil Engineers and ...
Dr. David Montgomery has been so prolific, that for several years I actually thought he was two people:First, Dr. D. Montgomery is a well known geomorphologist from the University of Washington (and a 2008 MacArthur Fellow) whose name is on much of the seminal, high-gradient channel transport and classification literature. And then there David Montgomery, the narrative non-fiction author from Seattle who wrote books like Dirt, The Rocks Don’t Lie, and The Hidden Half of Nature.It a...
We plan to start releasing season three on the first week of the new year. It was a fun and helpful season, which I'm looking forward to releasing.This preview overviews the guests and topics of the season with fun pull quotes from most of the guests.Look for the next episode the first week of January.This series was funded by the Regional Sediment Management (RSM) program.Mike Loretto edited the first three seasons and created the theme music.Tessa Hall is editing most of Season 4.Stan...
Jennifer Bountry leads the Sedimentation and River Hydraulics Branch of the US Bureau of Reclamation's Technical Service Center in Denver, CO where she helped to coordinate and draft an interagency guidance document on scaling sediment transport analyses to the project risk. It is a helpful and important document that I recommend to any group moving towards a dam removal, to help them triage the analyses required for their decommissioning. Jennifer was also involved in the analyse...
In the first two episodes of this season Dr. Annandale and Dr. Morris talked about reservoir sediment management practices all over the world. But examples in the continental US were noticeably absent. Reservoir sediment management in the US has encountered some challenges that have made US agencies slow to adopt these practices. But Dr. Paul Boyd and Dr. John Shelley are involved in more reservoir sediment management initiative in the United States than anyone I know. ...
Dr. Greg Morris wrote the first text on reservoir sediment management, which generated the categories and set the parameters for a lot of the work and conversations surrounding the topic in the last three decades. Most of us who work in this field got our start with his Reservoir Sedimentation Handbook. But he has also likely worked on more reservoirs with sedimentation issues - in more settings - than anyone else and has an uncommon reservoir of practical - on the ground - wisdom ...
Dr. George Annandale has been advocating for forward thinking about global water supply for decades...which is more connected to sedimentation processes than you might imagine. In his book, Quenching the Thirst he makes the case that reservoir sedimentation is one of the major challenges to future water supply and managing sediment at new and existing projects is a critical component of sustainable development.Dr. Annandale has worked on multiple projects at various scales both as a con...
The RSM River Mechanics Podcast is returning with a summer mini-season on reservoir sediment management. We recorded four episodes on this topic with some remarkable guests, so we're running them together this summer as a shorter "Season 2" before we release a full season this fall. Episodes include:Ep 2:1 – Dr. George Annandale on the Motivation, Economics, and Approaches to Reservoir Sediment ManagementEp 2:2 – Dr. Greg Morris on Reservoir Sediment Management Techniques and Appl...
We are wrapping up season 1 with the second half of our first interview. This is the rest of my conversation with US Army Corps of Engineers River Mechanics and River Engineering Subject-Matter Expert, Dr. David Biedenharn.If you have feedback on this season, recommendations for season 2 guests, or want to weigh in on our classic paper survey, there is a google form on the podcast website below.This series was funded by the Regional Sediment Management (RSM) program.Mike Loretto edited ...
I grew up in one of North America’s great snow belts…and started my career in Buffalo NY So, that background and my fascination with sediment transport primes curiosity in ice transport. I’m sure my ice friends would cringe at this, but I sometimes call ice transport as upside down sediment transport. But despite the symmetry of ice and sediment transport, they are separate, complicated, disciplines with little overlapping expertise. Which is why its remarkable, that this episode’s guest is...
