Dr. Charles J. Vörösmarty

Dr. Charles J. Vörösmarty is the 2010 – 2011 Faculty Fellow of the NRC Associateship Program at IWR. He is a professor of Civil Engineering and Director of The City University of New York’s Environmental Crossroads Initiative at The City College of New York. He is also a Distinguished Scientist with the NOAA-Cooperative Remote Sensing Science and Technology Center.

His research focuses on the development of computer models and geospatial data sets used in synthesis studies of the interactions between the water cycle, climate, biogeochemistry and anthropogenic activities. His studies are built around local, regional and continental to global-scale modeling of water balance, discharge, constituent fluxes in river systems, and the analysis of the impacts of large-scale water engineering on the terrestrial water cycle.

Before he came to The City College of New York, he was a Research Full Professor at the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans and Space at the University of New Hampshire. He was founder and director of its Water Systems Analysis Group at the University of New Hampshire. Dr. Vörösmarty is also a founding member of the Global Water System Project that represents the input of more than 200 international scientists under the International Council for Science’s Global Environmental Change Programs.

Dr. Vörösmarty serves on several national and international panels, including the U.S. Arctic Research Commission and the NASA Earth Science Subcommittee. He currently chairs the National Research Council’s Committee on Hydrologic Sciences. He was a member of the National Science Foundation’s Arctic System Science Program Steering Committee and the Arctic HYDRA International Polar Year Planning Team. He also was on a National Research Council panel that reviewed NASA’s polar geophysical data sets, the decadal study on earth observations, and he was co-chair of the National Science Foundation’s Arctic CHAMP hydrology initiative.

Dr. Vörösmarty has assembled regional and continental-scale hydro-meteorological data compendia, including the largest single collection, Arctic-RIMS (covering northern Eurasia and North America). He holds a copyright for the Global Hydrological Archive and Analysis System (GHAAS) and Global-RIMS. He has published numerous journal articles and served as convening lead author for the Millennium Assessment on Freshwater.

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