Climate Change in the Puget Sound: Will it Impact the Region's Water Resources?
Richard Palmer
Professor
UW Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
8 May 2007
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About the speaker
Rick Palmer currently teaches courses and performs research on the topics of water resource management, optimization and simulation techniques, risk analysis, systems analysis and expert systems. He is the author of over 80 refereed papers, conference proceeding papers and technical reports. He is a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers and is a registered professional engineer in the State of Washington.
Dr. Palmer received the "Service to the Professional" Award from the Water Resources Planning and Management Division of American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) in 1998. He was awarded the "Certificate of Recognition" for his editorial services to the Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management of ASCE in 1997, for which he was editor from 1993-1997. Dr. Palmer was awarded the Huber Award for Research Excellence by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) in 1992. This honor was based upon his innovative application of simulation and optimization techniques to issues in water resource management. His paper entitled "Operational Guidance During Droughts: An Expert System Approach" was awarded the Prize for Best Practice-Oriented Paper of the Year in the Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management by the ASCE in 1989. Dr. Palmer was a member of a team researchers from Johns Hopkins University and the Interstate Commission on the Potomac River Basin that was awarded a finalist recognition by ASCE for Engineering Achievement of the Year in 1983 for developing better regional management of the water supply of Washington, D.C. In 1987, he was awarded a fellowship for study in Spain at the Centro de Estudios Avanzados de Blanes, Spain, and was a Fellow at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland. He has also spent time on sabbatical at the Institute of Water Resources of the US Army Corps of Engineers.
Dr. Palmer's primary areas of interest are in the application of structured planning approaches to water resources. This includes reservoir management, the application of decision support and expert systems to civil engineering management problems, and real-time water resource management, particularly applied to drought. He has also developed the field of "shared vision models" in water resources planning, a technique that incorporates stakeholders into the model building process. A primary theme in his work has been the development and application of tools that have applied in non-deterministic settings, that is, those in which uncertainty and forecasts play a significant role in the problem solution. Dr. Palmer's current research activities include funded projects for the City of Portland (to develop computer models to support their infrastructure master planning effort), the state of Georgia (to develop a state wide drought management plan), and the Department of Energy (to develop models to determine the impacts of climate change in California's Central Valley (Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers))