RSM River Mechanics Podcast

Epizode

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  Gary Parker on Gravel Bed Rivers 17.07.2026 1h 1min

  Dr. Gary Parker is one of the defining figures in modern river mechanics and sediment transport. He's a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois or Urbana Champlain where he's been since 2005. Before that he was a distinguished professor at the University of Minnesota. He's a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Geophysical Union and has won more scientific awards than I can count - in multiple disciplines - that could each be thought of ...
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  Floodplain Sedimentation Pannel with Desiree Tullos, Janine Castro, and Jon Czuba 08.06.2026 1h 3min

  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 Tullos reached out and invited me I brought my podcast gear in just in case…...
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  Bill Dietrich on Meander Mechanics, Hillslopes, and Where Rivers Begin 10.04.2026 1h 27min

  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 theories of landscape evolution and geomorphic transport laws for soil production, hillslope tra...
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  Cohesive Sediment Properties and Processes with David Perkey, Jarrell Smith and Danielle Tarpley 13.03.2026 1h 13min

  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 exactly who I wanted to talk to. In the notebook where I track episode ideas, I labeled this one the “ERDC Cohesive Brai...
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  Mike Spoor on the Ohio River, Bank Failure, Glacial and Coal Mining Sediment Legacies...and 60 Years Working with Rivers 23.01.2026 1h 19min

  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 relentless field program to convert those years into insight. Mike's decades of ...
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  David Topping on the Grand Canyon Prototype Experiments, Disequilibrium Transport, and Hysteresis 27.07.2025 1h 2min

  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 of the reasons that the Glen Canyon releases have become in one of the most ambitious an...
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  Rob Ettema on River Ice, Ice-Sediment Interactions, and Sediment Scientist Biographies 17.04.2025 56min

  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, disciplines with little overlapping expertise. Which is why its remarkable, that this episode’s guest is...
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  Pierre Julien on Bed Forms, High Concentration Flow, and Engineering Rules of Thumb 14.03.2025 1h 3min

  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 partial differential equations and tensors as any other hydraulics text – maybe more – it...
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  Ellen Wohl on World Rivers, River Restoration, and the Dimensions of Fluvial Connectivity 21.02.2025 1h 2min

  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 important insights from both these scales. I’m not sure if Dr. Wohl leads the fluvial res...
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  "Ask an Editor" with Amy East (Bonus short) 11.01.2025 18min

  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: Earth Surface (and >10 years experience editing high impact journals) to provide a little primmer on how to ...
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  Peter Wilcock on Gravel Bed Rivers, Partial Transport, Armor Layer Persistence and Channel Design (Plus Wilcock & Crowe) 04.06.2024 1h 30min

  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...
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  Mary Power on River Ecology, Disturbance, and Inverted Pyramids 19.04.2024 59min

  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...
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  Alain Recking on Sediment Sorting, Transport, and Relative Roughness in Mountain Rivers 04.04.2024 54min

  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...
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  Sediment Modeling Failure Modes and Best Practices with Four Model Developers 21.03.2024 58min

  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...
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  Tony Thomas on the Origin of Sediment Modeling and Insights from >55 Years of Sediment Studies 08.03.2024 1h 7min

  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...
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  Jim Selegean and the "Classic Paper Draft" 22.02.2024 55min

  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...
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  Astrid Blom on Incision on the Rhine, Gravel-Sand Transitions, and Vertical Bedform Sorting 09.02.2024 41min

  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...
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  Marcello Garcia (part 2) on Sedimentation Hazards, the Bulle Effect, and Transport Paradigms 26.01.2024 54min

  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...
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  Marcelo Garcia Shares Some Sediment Stories and Discusses Manual of Practice 110 20.01.2024 1h

  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...
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  David Montgomery on High Gradient River Mechanics (Classification, Incipient Motion, and Wood) and Sediment Impacts on Human History 03.01.2024 53min

  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....