Nathan Swain
Board Member
Chair of Board
nswain@aquaveo.com
Dr. Nathan Swain is the Director of Development Services at Aquaveo specializing in developing open-source web solutions for water resources modeling, hydroinformatics, and GIS applications. He completed a Ph.D. at Brigham Young University with an emphasis on Civil and Environmental Engineering and Hydroinformatics. His research culminated in the development of Tethys Platform, an open-source, geospatial web application development framework.
Michael Souffront
Board Member
Fundraising Director
msouffront@aquaveo.com
Dr. Michael Souffront has more than 15 years of experience working in the Earth Sciences field. He specializes in hydrologic modeling workflow automation, data management, and visualization solutions. He completed a Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering at Brigham Young University with an emphasis on hydroinformatics. He also holds degrees from Utah State University and Universidad Central del Este in the Dominican Republic. Dr. Souffront is a current member of the GEOGLOWS Steering Committee where he supports GEOGLOWS efforts in collaboration with organizations that include ECMWF, NOAA, NASA, WMO, and the World Bank. He is also a Project Engineer at Aquaveo from where he continues to support GEOGLOWS development and maintenance, implement and integrate new capabilities into the Tethys Platform open-source framework, and work on a variety of Earth Science projects.
Katherine Moore Powell
Board Member
Membership Director
kmoorepowell@lynker.com
Dr. Moore Powell is a Senior Water Resources Scientist and Engagement Specialist for Lynker, with experience in software development, ecosystem research, and climate change adaptation planning. Her expertise is bringing science to actionable or operational solutions, innovating ways to combine research with local knowledge that can lead to more sustainable and resilient water and environmental management. Katherine has experience contracting with NASA on a citizen science project called Mountain Rain and Snow, with NOAA’s Office of Water Prediction (OWP) calculating flood frequencies and developing decision support tools, and NOAA’s National Ocean Service (NOS) helping to establish a coastal modeling cloud platform. Previously, Dr. Moore Powell was the climate change ecologist for the Field Museum in Chicago, where she led the development of two regional climate change adaptation plans. Katherine is also currently serving as a Director on the board for the American Water Resources Association (AWRA).
Shawn Crawley
Board Member
scrawley@lynker.com
Shawn Crawley is an Associate Software Engineer at Lynker where he primarily supports the Geospatial Intelligence Division of the National Water Center under NOAA’s Office of Water Prediction. His expertise includes automating and optimizing GIS-data-driven workflows based in SQL, Python and JavaScript. He received his Master’s Degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Brigham Young University with a focus on GIS and Hydroinformatics.
Norm Jones
Board Member
Program Director
njones@byu.edu
Dr. Norm Jones is a professor in the Civil and Construction Engineering Department at Brigham Young University where he has been on the faculty since 1991. He earned his BS degree in Civil Engineering at BYU and his MS and PhD degrees in Civil Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. He was the director of the BYU Environmental Modeling Research Laboratory where he supervised the development of the Groundwater Modeling System software. He helped found Aquaveo, LLC in 2007. He was the principal investigator for the CI-WATER grant funded by the National Science Foundation where the original Tethys Platform was developed. His current research interests involve assessing groundwater storage changes and aquifer sustainability using Earth observations. He has 87 peer-reviewed publications and has been a PI or Co-I on 26 externally funded projects totaling $22M. He served 6 years as department chair. He has received several awards, including the 2021 John Hem Award for Science and Engineering by the National Groundwater Association and the 2001 ASCE Walter L Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize.
E. James “Jim” Nelson
Board Member
Program Director
njones@byu.edu
Dr. E. James “Jim” Nelson is a Professor of Civil & Construction Engineering at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. He has been a pioneer in developing geospatial hydrologic modeling and hydroinformatics tools and is the principal developer of the Watershed Modeling System (WMS) which since the 1990’s has been widely disseminated and used for development of hydrologic models and visualization of results. In recent years he and his colleagues at BYU developed Tethys Platform, free and open-source tools that lower the barrier for engineers to create web-applications for hydroinformatics. Tethys has been a foundational element of the GEOGLOWS ECMWF Global Streamflow Services which provide an 80-year historical simulation and 15-day forecast on every river of the world daily. Learn more about this partnership here.
Additional Links:
GEOGLOWS
Publications, API documentation
Chandler Scott
(Non-board) Officer
Secretary
cscott@aquaveo.com
Chandler Scott is a developer at Aquaveo, a company specializing in water resources software and engineering services. He has a strong background in computer programming, with a particular affinity for C++ and Python as his primary languages.
He enjoys exploring and learning various other programming languages as well. In addition to his role at Aquaveo, Chandler is an active contributor to open-source projects and a member of the Conan 2.0 Tribe, a group of over 70 Conan expert users and contributors who provided valuable feedback during the development of Conan 2.0, a C and C++ open-source package manager.
Dan Ames
(Non-board) Officer
Treasurer
dan.ames@byu.edu
Dr. Ames is a professor of water resources engineering at Brigham Young University, where he teaches and conducts research in GIS and hydroinformatics. Dr. Ames is the original developer and project manager of several open-source open-source software tools, including MapWindow GIS, DotSpatial, and HydroDesktop; he is also a PI for the Tethys Platform and HydroShare projects. Dr. Ames’ research interests and publications include geospatial and hydrologic web services, hydrologic information systems, watershed modeling, uncertainty, terrain analysis, evapotranspiration, and open hardware data sensor networks. Dr. Ames is the Editor-in-Chief of the prestigious scientific journal Environmental Modelling & Software and is past president of the International Environmental Modelling & Software Society.