DOINews: Reclamation Names 2014 Engineer of the Year

WASHINGTON — Subhrendu Gangopadhyay, Ph.D., hydrologic engineer in Reclamation's Technical Service Center in Denver, is the Bureau of Reclamation's Engineer of the Year for 2014. He represented Reclamation at the Federal Engineer of the Year Awards Luncheon at the National Press Club in Washington.

"Reclamation's engineering expertise is known throughout the world and this expertise is now developing tools to guide a sustainable water and power future for the West," said Reclamation Commissioner Michael L. Connor. "Subrendu's leadership in developing the 'West-wide Climate Risk Assessmen' lead to an understanding of climate change risks of eight basins in the Western United States."

Gangopadhyay is Reclamation's lead engineer in assessing climate change and its impact on water delivery and consumptive use. In 2011, he developed the process and methodology to complete the “West-wide Climate Risk Assessment.” The report covers eight major Reclamation river basins and assesses specific risks to the water supply of each river basin, including risk relating to a change in snowpack, timing and quantity of runoff, groundwater recharge and discharge and increase in the demand for water as a result of increasing temperatures and rate of reservoir evaporation. He is currently leading the team for a follow up report focusing on estimating agricultural demands with changes in consumptive use and reservoir evaporation in the same eight river basins.

He has also published several papers. Examples of his work include: "Statistical modeling of daily and subdaily stream temperatures: Application to the Methow River Basin, Washington;" "Predicting regime shifts in flow of the Gunnison River under changing climate conditions" and "The impact of subsurface conceptualization on land energy fluxes."

Gangopadhyay is the Technical Service Center Engineer of the Year and is a registered Professional Engineer in Colorado. He is a member of the American Geophysical Union and has a Doctor of Engineering in Civil Engineering from the Asian Institute of Technology in Bangkok, Thailand. He also completed post-doctoral research at the University of Colorado in Hydroclimatology.

Regional engineers of the year are:

Pacific Northwest Region: Scott Ross

Mid-Pacific Region: Todd Hill

Upper Colorado Region: Ed Vidmar

Great Plains Region: David Scanson

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