Fred L. Ogden, Ph.D., P.E., F.EWRI, F.ASCE, who works with the IBSS Corp. as acting chief scientist and academic-in-residence at the U.S. National Water Center, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, has been named a Fellow by the ASCE Board of Direction.
Ogden advises leaders of the NOAA–National Weather Service, Office of Water Prediction on modeling technologies to improve the nations’ flood and drought prediction capabilities.
From 2006 to 2017, Ogden served as Professor / Roy and Caryl Cline Distinguished Chair of Engineering, Environment, and Natural Resources tenured in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Wyoming. He taught and led a variety of research projects on hydrological model development, hydrology, hydraulics, unsaturated flow through porous media, and high-performance computing in hydrosciences. Notably, he led a multidisciplinary project that evaluated the effectiveness of land management payments in the Panama Canal watershed aimed at increasing dry season river flows and reducing peak flows in the rainy season.
Between 1994 and 2005, Ogden held ranks of assistant and tenured associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Connecticut, in Storrs. He was a postdoctoral associate and research engineer at the Iowa Institute of Hydraulic Research, University of Iowa in 1992-1994.
Ogden received a U.S. Army Research Office Young Investigator award in 1996. He was awarded the ASCE Collingwood Prize in 1999 for a survey paper he cowrote with the late Tatsuaki Nakato on sediment control at riverside water intake structures. He received the ASCE Arid Lands Hydraulic Engineering Award in 2015 for his work with collaborators and graduate students developing novel computational hydrological models including CASC2D, GSSHA, ADHydro.
He led the team that in 2017 first derived an alternative form of Richards’ equation called the Soil Moisture Velocity Equation, which provides theoretical justification for a host of novel and robust 1D solutions to the problem of capillary and gravity-driven unsaturated flow in porous media. A related paper received the 2015 “Coolest Paper Award” by the International Association of Hydrogeologists, at their annual meeting in Montpelier, France.
Ogden has authored or coauthored nearly 200 peer-reviewed papers, reports, and conference submissions. His first research paper written with M.S. advisor James F. Ruff on the effectiveness of bentonite water well annulus seals was awarded Outstanding Research Paper for Practice by the editorial board of the ASCE Journal of Irrigation & Drainage Engineering in 1992. To date, Ogden has advised 14 M.S. and eight Ph.D. students to the completion of their degrees, all in civil engineering.
He has also served on numerous review and advisory panels and professional committees. Notably, from 2008 to 2012 he served as an administrative law judge on the State of Wyoming Environmental Quality Council. In 2011-2012 he chaired the ASCE/EWRI Surface Water Hydrology Technical Committee.
Ogden is currently licensed as a professional engineer in Colorado and Wyoming. He earned B.S. (1987), M.S. (1989), and Ph.D. (1992) degrees in civil engineering from Colorado State University.
