Earth observation and geospatial information services for disaster risk reduction – Examples from the HKH

Jim Nelson is a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Brigham Young University, where he has worked since 1996 and currently holds the BYU College of Engineering Armin Hill Professorship. In 2019, he was awarded the American Water Resources Association David R. Maidment Award for Exemplary Contributions to Water Resources. He was the primary developer of the Watershed Modeling System, a pre-post processor for hydrologic modeling adopted by the US Federal Highways Administration for all state department of transportation’s use in hydrologic design and licensed to thousands of users in more than 100 countries worldwide. The Brigham Young University hydroinformatics lab is a world-leader in web application development for water resources and produced the open source Tethys Platform used by NASA, US Army Corps of Engineers, and others for the visualization and delivery of water resources information as a web service. He has published more than 60 articles in peer-reviewed journals and several other contributions to books, user’s manuals, and other conference proceedings. Most recently, he has been a key member of the Group on Earth Observations Global Water Sustainability (GEOGloWS) initiative and the leader of the partnership in developing a global streamflow forecasting system as a service based on the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts GloFAS model. This effort grew out of a NASA-SERVIR project focused on the HKH region in collaboration with ICIMOD and now is used, with other tools as part of their MENRIS programme.