I recently described Chris Nygaard as the Corps’ BSPS, our 'Big Sediment Pulse Specialist.'  He led sediment analysis and modeling on the Corps’ latest evaluation of Mount Saint Helens downstream-sediment impacts and a dam removal alternative on the Snake River.  In those projects he analyzed the fate of sediment pulses (real or hypothetical) on the order of hundreds-of-millions of tons.  But Chris also recently spent a couple years as a project engineer with Bonneville P...

Chris Nygaard on Dam Removal Modeling, Mt Saint Helens Sediment, and Restoration Projects

Conversations about River Mechanics, Sediment Transport, and Fluvial Geomorphology

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Dr. 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 gravel...

Mary Power on River Ecology, Disturbance, and Inverted Pyramids

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...

Alain Recking on Sediment Sorting, Transport, and Relative Roughness in Mountain Rivers

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...

Sediment Modeling Failure Modes and Best Practices with Four Model Developers

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...

Tony Thomas on the Origin of Sediment Modeling and Insights from >55 Years of Sediment Studies

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...

Chris Nygaard on Dam Removal Modeling, Mt Saint Helens Sediment, and Restoration Projects

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