RSM River Mechanics Podcast

About a year ago an interdisciplinary tam at Oregon State invited a collection of subject matter experts for workshop on floodplain sedimentation processes.   The workshop took up a very specific question but gathering this much expertise on floodplain landforms and processes generated a wide-ranging discussion of how floodplains work, how to restore them, and even what they are.   So when Desiree...

Over his career Dr. Bill Dietrich has had an outsized influence on both the discipline of geomorphology and the community that surrounds the discipline.  He is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Dietrich is one of the most influential geomorphologists of the last several decades, known for developing process-based theo...

So far on this podcast we've generally used the noun "sediment" to describe sand, gravel, and maybe cobbles and boulders. But the same word also gets used for silts, clays, and muds - materials that behave so differently that lumping them together as "sediment" can blur important distinctions.  This podcast was overdue for a conversation about fine sediment, and I knew exa...

I only know one person who can claim >60 years of federal service.  This episode's guest, Mike Spoor.  Mike spent those years with the US Army Corps of Engineers Huntington District (in West Virginia on the banks of the Ohio River) and even more years before that as a contractor to the Kansas City District. But Mike did not just log federal service.  He focused curiosity and insight with a...

Dr. David Topping is a Research Hydrologist with the US Geological Survey. He did his undergrad at MIT, a masters and Phd at the University of Washington and has published >100 well cited peer review publications.  Dr Topping  has worked with the USGS for >30 years but for the last 18 or so have been with the Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center in Flagstaff AZ where he has been one o...

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, disciplin...

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 pa...

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 importan...

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:...

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...

t 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 spoi...

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 grav...

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 sam...

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...

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...

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 assoc...

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 approache...

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 awar...

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...

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...

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...

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 rese...

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 setting...

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 sustainab...

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 Res...