David Bjerklie, Ph.D.

Dave Bjerklie retired from the USGS in 2018 after 18 years of service and returned as a part time employee on a short-term appointment to assist with an on-going USGS program developing satellite remote sensing measures of river discharge. He has over 40 years of experience in water resource investigations as a consulting engineer and scientist. His educational background includes a bachelor's degree in Marine Biology, a master's degree in Civil Engineering, and a Doctorate in Earth Sciences. He has worked professionally in Maine, Alaska, the pacific northwest, and across New England as well as on national scale projects.

Dave's Adjunct Professor experience includes following courses taught: Natural Resource Measurements, Environmental Hydrology, Introduction to Environmental Science, Water and Wastewater Treatment Systems, and Environmental Seminar.

When working with the USGS, Dave has developed proposals and worked as a principal investigator for many studies:

• New Hampshire wide watershed modeling project for a statewide future water resource assessment for the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services.
• Study of the potential effects of sea-level rise on coastal groundwater in the New Haven area and specifically beneath the campus of Yale University.
• Development of a one-dimensional model to estimate maximum tide heights in estuaries along the coast of Connecticut.
• Community-based watershed modeling to estimate potential changes to groundwater recharge and streamflow due to changes in land-use and climate change in a medium sized river basin in Connecticut.
• River hydraulic modeling and floodplain delineation for numerous rivers in Connecticut, and use of remote sensing to map extreme flooding conditions around Lake Champlain in May 2011 for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

He was also a co-investigator and science team member on several NASA grants to evaluate the use of satellite imagery, radar and lidar altimetry to estimate in-bank river geometry and discharge from space.

Dave is currently a part of the USGS team developing remote sensing discharge ratings for Alaska including development and documentation of methods, uncertainties, data quality, and gaging network design.