Draft:Richard M. Vogel

Richard M. Vogel is an American hydrologist and environmental engineer and professor emeritus in the department of civil and environmental engineering at Tufts University.

He is the recipient of the AGU Walter Langbein Lecture award, the ASCE Ven Te Chow Award,  the ASCE Julian Hinds Award and the ASCE  Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize

Education
Vogel earned his Bachelor of Science in Engineering Science and Systems from the University of Virginia in 1976; he obtained a Master of Science in Environmental Science and Hydrology in 1979 from the University of Virginia, and a PhD in Water Resource Systems from Cornell University in 1984.

Career
Vogel has been the professor of Tufts University since 1984, In 2017, He was made professor emeritus in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

In 2016, after 33 years of service, he transitioned from a full professor role to Professor Emeritus. He also served as a cofounder and director of the interdisciplinary graduate program in Water: Systems, Science, and Society.

Research
With a research career spanning more than forty years, Vogel has been engaged in hydrology, environmental engineering, natural hazards, and water resource engineering.

Since his retirement in 2016, He has researched on advancing hydrologic risk management. Notably, he has focused on converting deterministic watershed models into stochastic ones, enhancing their utility in nonstationary conditions, and Pioneering research revealed that changes in land use have a more substantial impact on flood magnitude and frequency in the United States than climate change. He documented the unusual behavior of the probability distribution of a hydrologic system's return period under nonstationary conditions, emphasizing the preference for reliability over a planning horizon.

Moreover, he introduced hazard function analysis for nonstationary frequency analysis across various natural hazards, his contributions extend to a foundational systems model, forming the basis for the EPA Watershed Management Optimization Support Tool (WMOST) model. In 2009, leading a project for the Boston Groundwater Trust, he assessed the impact of potential drops in groundwater levels, advocating for drywell installation as a zoning law requirement to recharge groundwater during building modifications, this project aimed to enhance groundwater levels amid complex factors like rainfall, stormwater controls, leaky pipes, and diverse infrastructure beneath the city. Vogel's recent hydrology research addresses concerns in common statistics, proposing improved estimators for key metrics like Pearson correlation, Nash Sutcliffe efficiency, Kling Gupta efficiency, and coefficient of variation. In another paper, titled ‘The geometric mean?’ he questions the use of this widely used statistic. In Pioneering stochastic watershed models, he transforms deterministic rainfall-runoff simulations, addressing biases in flood and drought statistics. In hydrologic design under nonstationary conditions, he explores system evolution under changing climate and land use, emphasizing risk and reliability.

Vogel's work includes selecting probability distributions, introducing widely adopted tests, he introduces the theory of records, providing a framework for understanding extreme events. His Contributions extend to water supply engineering, flow duration curves, regional hydrology, and natural hazards.

He analyzes various hazards, from floods to earthquakes and landslides, and pioneered the concept of elasticity for streamflow sensitivity. Additionally, Vogel combines watershed simulation models with optimization algorithms for optimal watershed management.

Selected awards

 * 2023: honored with the Walter Langbein Lecture by the American Geophysical Union for lifetime contributions to the science of hydrology.
 * 2020: Distinguished Member of American Society of Civil Engineers.
 * 2020: Ven Te Chow Award from ASCE Environmental and Water Resources Institute.
 * 2019: Statistics in Hydrology (STAHY) Best Paper Award of International Commission on Statistical Hydrology (ICSH) of the International Association of Hydrological Sciences.
 * 2017: Elected Fellow of the American Geophysical Union for development of hydrologic science and statistical methods in service to society and the field of water resources.