Technical articles on water resources modeling, environmental science, and data engineering from our team of engineers and scientists.
A federal proposal would protect a creek only if it has water almost every day of the year. That sounds simple until you try to prove it, because most small streams in the country have never been measured.
Water agencies now ask whether a reservoir forecast is any good. They have not agreed on what to measure it against, so no two answers can be compared. A 52-year hindcast on a public reservoir shows what a properly benchmarked answer looks like, and how much a single headline skill number can hide.
The 2026 Pacific Northwest fire season has produced a water problem that has not started yet. The burn scars that matter for source water are not above Seattle or Portland. They are above Wenatchee, Lake Chelan, the Okanogan, the Yakima, The Dalles, Spokane's sole-source aquifer, and Boise.
When a forested watershed burns, the next storm carries ash, sediment, and organic matter toward the intake. But fewer than a third of burned watersheds show a measurable water-quality response, which makes the operational problem triage: which intake to worry about, and what to sample.
EPA's 2024 PFAS drinking water rule has bifurcated. The 2027 monitoring deadline holds, but PFOA/PFOS treatment faces a proposed two-year extension to 2031, and three secondary MCLs are proposed for rescission. Here is what the split timeline means for utility planning and consulting work through 2031.
NOAA is rebuilding the National Water Model on a new framework called NextGen. The next major release, NWM v4, will be the first to run on it. For projects that use NWM forecasts as a model input or a reference dataset, the character of those forecasts is about to change.
NOAA Atlas 15 Volume 1 CONUS preliminary estimates are scheduled for release in September 2026. Once jurisdictions begin to adopt it, the IDF tables underlying nearly every municipal stormwater code in the country go obsolete on the page. The transition will not be clean. Most jurisdictions do not yet have a plan.
The USGS operates over 10,000 stream gauges nationwide and provides free access to decades of hydrologic data. Here's how to find, access, and download the data you need for your engineering projects.
Traditional SWAT calibration requires thousands of simulations with uncertain convergence. The diagnostic-guided approach analyzes hydrograph errors to target exactly what needs to change — converging in a fraction of the time.
Two of the most widely used tools in water resources engineering serve very different purposes. Here's how to decide which one your project needs — and why most projects need both.
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