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© 2025 RSM River Mechanics Podcast
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Conversations about River Mechanics, Sediment Transport, and Fluvial Geomorphology
29 Episodes
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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, a...
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 spoiler alert, it sometimes involves the sorts of things we tend to talk about here…like the g...
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 d...
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 sed...
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...
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 dias...
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 re...
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 direc...
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 Engine...
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....
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 Se...
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 analy...
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.&nbs...
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 ...
1Dr. 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 co...
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 Management Ep 2:2 – Dr. Greg Morris on Reservoir Sediment Management Techniques and A...
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 e...
The regressive erosion on the Rio Coca (Ecuador) may be the morphological event of our generation. But, because it happened in February 2020, when there was not much room in the news cycle, most people haven't heard about it...even in the geomorph community. In this episode we try to rectify that. I talked to Pablo Espinoza Giron and Pedro David Barrera Crespo, two of the scientists/engineers who have been working on the Ecuadorian response since the beginning. ...
Dr. Richard Iverson led the mud and debris flow investigations at the USGS Cascade Volcano Observatory for years, including large scale flume and numerical work that unlocked a remarkable number of new insights about these high-concentration flows. His findings have influenced the way I think about these events more than any other source. With the rising interest in post-wildfire debris flow hazards, these events are getting more attention, so these findings have never been ...
Dr. Katie Brutsche led the Regional Sediment Management Program for several years. Regional Sediment Management is the "RSM" in the title of this podcast, and the reason this project exists. RSM is the aspirational conceptual model of the Corps of Engineer's sediment management over the last couple decades. We talk about the principles of RSM, the RSM process, some example projects, sediment budgets, and some surprising stats that you probably don't know about dredging. Befo...
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