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 decades.

Now, if you get a couple of model developers together, we could talk all day about transport equations and algorithms.
And we did.  

But I am going to turn most of that technical modeling content, into videos to run on the YouTube page and in the RAS manual.

This conversation focuses on Tony’s insights that I think have the broadest application.

Because one of the things that make’s Tony’s career so interesting, transcends modeling.

After Tony worked at HEC, he moved to the Corp’s lab in Mississippi  and then started Mobile Boundary Hydraulics,  which was the premier 1D sediment modeling shop for decades.

But if you follow the timeline, that means that Tony (who only recently, actually, retired) has been predicting river processes for more than 60 years.
He is one of the few people who has seen the end of his 50 year project life predictions.

And all numerical modeling is – fundamentally - is exposing your mental models, to quantitative feedback and observational falsification.
It’s a learning loop with Rivers…
 …and no one has been working that learning loop longer than Tony.

I essentially sit in that seat Tony invited as the sediment modeling specialist here at HEC.  But Tony actually had a more direct influence on me than that.
About 20 years ago, when we decided to put 1D sediment transport into HEC-RAS, we got a grant to bring Tony back to HEC and he spent 5 months essentially teaching me how to develop a generalized sediment model.

There was a point in my life, where almost everything I knew about sediment came from Tony, and his insights and categories still frame the way I look at rivers.

When I first imagined this podcast, it included a conversation with Tony, reproducing some of those formative conversations we had over the years.

So in this conversation we talk about the sediment modeling origin story and some of the modeling principals he’s famous for but we also just talk about the river processes and projects that built his intuition and/or surprised him over the years.

(Photo Credit: Tony on the Arroyo Pasajero – provided by Dr. Ron Copeland) 

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.

Stanford Gibson (HEC Sediment Specialist) hosts.

Video shorts and other bonus content are available at the podcast website:
https://www.hec.usace.army.mil/confluence/rasdocs/rastraining/latest/the-rsm-river-mechanics-podcast

...but most of the supplementary videos are available on the HEC Sediment YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/user/stanfordgibson

If you have guest recommendations or feedback you can reach out to me on LinkedIn or ResearchGate or fill out this recommendation and feedback form: https://forms.gle/wWJLVSEYe7S8Cd248

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 diaspora,  Jim’s protégées who fill important sediment and river mechanics leadership positions across the Corps.

 We recorded this podcast in the lab and field investigation shop  Jim built on the Detroit River, which is the most complete and productive corps sediment lab I know of outside Mississippi. 

 Within my agency, I don’t know anyone who has quite the grasp of the river mechanics cannon, as Dr. Jim Selegean of the Corps of Engineers’ Detroit District.

 But he also metabolizes as much contemporary literature as anyone I know in our agency, which manifests in a weekly email he sends out, with the 8-10 best papers he read from current journals that week and a 3-4 sentence summary of his favorites.

 (If you’d like to get on that list, you can reach out to him at [email protected])

 One of the things I found helpful in my Ecology education was a Foundations of Ecology text (https://a.co/d/9zjK1wg) which compiled the classic papers in ecology and commentaries by noted contemporary scientists whose work built on that particular area of reflection.

 Years ago I pitched this type of book to Jim, suggesting we should try to write it of our field.

 He just laughed at me, wisely predicting that neither of us nearly the time required.

But when I stared to design this podcast, I knew I wanted to recording a kind of “pitch meeting” for the papers we would each include in that compilation.

 But, Jim is also one of the most fun people I work so we tried to make it a little more entertaining…and a little competitive, by giving it a draft format (like picking players for a schoolyard football game).

 There was some strategy…that mostly went Jim’s way.

 Feel free to find the posts associated with this podcast on LinkedIn or X to offer your choices…maybe we’ll do another one.

 But for now, welcome, to the RSM River Mechanics Podcast…Classic Paper Draft.

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.

Stanford Gibson (HEC Sediment Specialist) hosts.

Video shorts and other bonus content are available at the podcast website:
https://www.hec.usace.army.mil/confluence/rasdocs/rastraining/latest/the-rsm-river-mechanics-podcast

...but most of the supplementary videos are available on the HEC Sediment YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/user/stanfordgibson

If you have guest recommendations or feedback you can reach out to me on LinkedIn or ResearchGate or fill out this recommendation and feedback form: https://forms.gle/wWJLVSEYe7S8Cd248

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 recent work and, as you’ll here in our conversation - the work she is most passionate about – is that actionable – morphological modeling of the Dutch reach of the Rhine that can influence wise and sustainable management.

 And I’ve been interested in Dr. Blom’s work on the Rhine for a while, partially because of its similarity to the Missouri in the US – which is a river of comparable size with comparable human modifications, which is also incising. 

 But I first started following Dr. Blom’s research over 15 years ago – with work she did at the particle scale – with detailed laboratory work on the vertical mixing processes in bedforms composed of a wide range of grain sizes.

So we talked about both of these scales.  

 We mostly talked about the Rhine, because the river’s natural template, the long history of human modification, the reach scale incision, and contemporary management efforts on that system are so interesting.  

 And we covered some fundamental processes at that scale, including how gravel-sand transitions evolve on engineering and geologic time horizons on a river that size, the impacts of incision on a large, multi-use, waterway, and some of the management practices targeted to mitigate these impacts.

 But we also downscaled a little to talk about her early lab work…because it really has affected the way I look at bimodal rivers and gravel-sand transitions.

Links to Dr. Blom's papers are on the podcast website (link below).

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.

Stanford Gibson (HEC Sediment Specialist) hosts.

Video shorts and other bonus content are available at the podcast website:
https://www.hec.usace.army.mil/confluence/rasdocs/rastraining/latest/the-rsm-river-mechanics-podcast

...but most of the supplementary videos are available on the HEC Sediment YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/user/stanfordgibson

If you have guest recommendations or feedback you can reach out to me on LinkedIn or ResearchGate or fill out this recommendation and feedback form: https://forms.gle/wWJLVSEYe7S8Cd248

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 of the Ven Te Chow hydraulic lab.  

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.

Stanford Gibson (HEC Sediment Specialist) hosts.

Video shorts and other bonus content are available at the podcast website:
https://www.hec.usace.army.mil/confluence/rasdocs/rastraining/latest/the-rsm-river-mechanics-podcast

...but most of the supplementary videos are available on the HEC Sediment YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/user/stanfordgibson

If you have guest recommendations or feedback you can reach out to me on LinkedIn or ResearchGate or fill out this recommendation and feedback form: https://forms.gle/wWJLVSEYe7S8Cd248

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 the an elected fellow of the American Geophysical Union.

And that’s all very impressive.  Dr. Garcia is - without question – one of the leading quantitative sediment scientists of his generation.

But the quality that made this conversation remarkable, is Marcello’s grasp and deep connection with the history of the sediment transport and river mechanics disciplines.

It became clear that he sees his work in continuity with the foundational work and scientists that preceded him.  He has effortlessly describes how modern sediment transport principles or puzzles are rooted in the work and lives of our discipline’s historic figures.

And, well, these are some of the big themes I hoped for with this podcast.

This is also why he was uniquely qualified to the 10-year project of compiling the American Society of Civil Engineers Manual of Practice on Sedimentation (110) – arguably the most comprehensive work on sediment science and engineering available. 

We talked about that project, how he collaborated with dozens of authors to knit together this massive compendium of sediment and river insight.  But in the process, I learned a lot, not only about some of the big ideas in our disciplines, but also the stories of the people behind them and how they became some of our big ideas.

The ASCE Manual of Practice is here: https://ascelibrary.org/doi/10.1061/40856%28200%2994

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.

Stanford Gibson (HEC Sediment Specialist) hosts.

Video shorts and other bonus content are available at the podcast website:
https://www.hec.usace.army.mil/confluence/rasdocs/rastraining/latest/the-rsm-river-mechanics-podcast

...but most of the supplementary videos are available on the HEC Sediment YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/user/stanfordgibson

If you have guest recommendations or feedback you can reach out to me on LinkedIn or ResearchGate or fill out this recommendation and feedback form: https://forms.gle/wWJLVSEYe7S8Cd248

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 actually took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize that this was the same person.

So the first time I sat down to scribble a list of guests I’d like to invite on a yet to be named river process podcast, Dr. David Montgomery was on that first list…because who wouldn’t want to talk to both those people...especially at the same time.

In this conversation David and I moved between the spatial and temporal scales his work spans,  discussing the deep sediment history from his books and his classical technical work.

 We cover the role of sediment in the rise and fall of ancient near-eastern civilizations, high-gradient river classification, a surprising story about the long temporal tail of wood impacts in natural river systems, incipient motion at the grain scale, and, somehow, a range of other topics.

 And, I found out that there is, actually, a third David Montgomery…guitar and vocals for the Seattle band Big Dirt, so most of the music you’ll hear (after the opening theme) is from their new album. 


You can find David's books that we talked about here:
Dirt - https://a.co/d/eaE9P3Y
The King of Fish - https://a.co/d/2wArLH1
The Hidden Half of Nature - https://a.co/d/1ZIU9Tb
What Your Food Ate - https://a.co/d/9Qtt0dX

And you can access music from Big Dirt here:
https://open.spotify.com/artist/6CAz9l0qkiWwLlaVHC1Xrm

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.

Stanford Gibson (HEC Sediment Specialist) hosts.

Video shorts and other bonus content are available at the podcast website:
https://www.hec.usace.army.mil/confluence/rasdocs/rastraining/latest/the-rsm-river-mechanics-podcast

...but most of the supplementary videos are available on the HEC Sediment YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/user/stanfordgibson

If you have guest recommendations or feedback you can reach out to me on LinkedIn or ResearchGate or fill out this recommendation and feedback form: https://forms.gle/wWJLVSEYe7S8Cd248

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.

Stanford Gibson (HEC Sediment Specialist) hosts.

Video shorts and other bonus content are available at the podcast website:
https://www.hec.usace.army.mil/confluence/rasdocs/rastraining/latest/the-rsm-river-mechanics-podcast

...but most of the supplementary videos are available on the HEC Sediment YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/user/stanfordgibson

If you have guest recommendations or feedback you can reach out to me on LinkedIn or ResearchGate or fill out this recommendation and feedback form: https://forms.gle/wWJLVSEYe7S8Cd248

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 analyses for the largest anthropogenic dam removal to date, and talked to us about her team's experiences with the Elwha dams.  We wanted to wrap up our reservoir sediment mini-season talking about the final stage in the reservoir sediment life-cycle, and her experiences on the project and national scale made Jennifer an excellent guide into this world.

The Dam Removal Analysis Guidelines for Sediment are here:
https://www.usbr.gov/tsc/techreferences/mands/mands-pdfs/DamRemovalAnalysisGuidelinesForSediment_09-2016_508.pdf

Dam Removal Cost Triage "Shiny App": https://wrises.shinyapps.io/DamRemovalCostPredictiveModel/

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.

Stanford Gibson (HEC Sediment Specialist) hosts.

Video shorts and other bonus content are available at the podcast website:
https://www.hec.usace.army.mil/confluence/rasdocs/rastraining/latest/the-rsm-river-mechanics-podcast

...but most of the supplementary videos are available on the HEC Sediment YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/user/stanfordgibson

If you have guest recommendations or feedback you can reach out to me on LinkedIn or ResearchGate or fill out this recommendation and feedback form: https://forms.gle/wWJLVSEYe7S8Cd248

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. Boyd and Dr. Shelley are the regional technical specialists for sediment transport on the Missouri River watershed (Paul in the Omaha District and John in Kansas City)  and the Corps' national subject matter experts on reservoir sediment management. 

So I wanted to dedicate an episode to check in on these practices in my country, and talk about the "nascent" (as Dr. Morris described it) but growing momentum behind sediment sustainability in the United States.

The paper we talk about at the end of the conversation can be found here: 
https://ascelibrary.org/doi/full/10.1061/%28ASCE%29WR.1943-5452.0001494

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.

Stanford Gibson (HEC Sediment Specialist) hosts.

Video shorts and other bonus content are available at the podcast website:
https://www.hec.usace.army.mil/confluence/rasdocs/rastraining/latest/the-rsm-river-mechanics-podcast

...but most of the supplementary videos are available on the HEC Sediment YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/user/stanfordgibson

If you have guest recommendations or feedback you can reach out to me on LinkedIn or ResearchGate or fill out this recommendation and feedback form: https://forms.gle/wWJLVSEYe7S8Cd248

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 to offer.  We got into the details, pros and cons, and case studies of the different reservoir management alternatives from his experiences around the world.

Dr. Morris' Handbook and other useful publications are available to download here: www.reservoirsedimentation.com 

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.

Stanford Gibson (HEC Sediment Specialist) hosts.

Video shorts and other bonus content are available at the podcast website:
https://www.hec.usace.army.mil/confluence/rasdocs/rastraining/latest/the-rsm-river-mechanics-podcast

...but most of the supplementary videos are available on the HEC Sediment YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/user/stanfordgibson

If you have guest recommendations or feedback you can reach out to me on LinkedIn or ResearchGate or fill out this recommendation and feedback form: https://forms.gle/wWJLVSEYe7S8Cd248