Samuel H. Austin

Areas of interest: Surface water hydrology, fluvial geomorphology, environmental and economic analytics, forest management, forecasting, scenario analysis. Evaluating management decisions, trends, time-series, economic and financial questions, supply-chain dynamics, logistics, impulse-response problems.

Special skills: System dynamics modeling, developing project specific analytical tools, custom design of sampling experiments, characterizing statistical variation and relations, determining probable outcomes, testing data for trends, evaluating large and small datasets, reconditioning data.

Methods applied: Discrete and dynamic modeling and simulation. Evaluation of processes, decision interactions, and outcomes that include identifying system structure and simulating endogenous feedback. Interpreting, and characterizing large datasets using innovative statistical methods.
 
Fields of endeavor: Forest land-use and carbon metrics, surface water flows, hydrology, fluvial geomorphology, processes that include humans and ecosystems.

Areas of special knowledge: forest hydrology, fluvial geomorphology, watershed analysis, forest ecosystem dynamics, open channel flow, suspended and bed sediments, particle shear stress, critical shear velocities, stream classification and evaluation, production-distribution and control systems, management decision-making, biogeochemical cycling and feedback in natural systems.

See ORC-ID page for examples illustrating the educational potential of interactive simulation tools.

• Darcy's Law

• Urban Runoff

• Sediment Motion