Ron Copeland on Analytical Channel Design, the Laursen-Copeland Transport Function, and Mississippi Morphology

Ron Copeland has worked for the Corps of Engineers for over 5 decades, 52 years at the Los Angeles district and the Corps' Coastal and Hydraulics lab in Vicksburg Mississippi. He also worked for 10 years as a principle engineer at Mobile Boundary Hydraulics, which was the premiere 1D sediment transport modeling firm for decades.  But Dr. Copeland has not only been on a very short list of the very best 1D sediment transport modelers for decades, he also developed several equations and algorithms that multiple models use.  In 2020, he won the ASCE, Hans Albert Einstein award. 

And, while I think Dr. Copeland's modeling expertise has a lot of value to the community growing around this podcast (and we spent some time talking modeling) his sediment and river mechanics contributions include much more .  He led a team who wrote the Corps early guidance on restoration channel design and developed an important, expedited, tool to evaluate sediment continuity of restored channels, a common failure mode of early restoration projects.  We talked to him about all of that...and some more technical topics that we spun out into video shorts (see the website link).

This series was funded by the Regional Sediment Management (RSM) program.

Stanford Gibson (HEC Sediment Specialist) hosts.

Mike Loretto edited the episode and wrote and performed the music.

Video shorts and other bonus content are available at the podcast website:
https://www.hec.usace.army.mil/confluence/rasdocs/rastraining/latest/the-rsm-river-mechanics-podcast

...but most of the supplementary videos are available on the HEC Sediment YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/user/stanfordgibson

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