Hydrosphere Staff
Benjamin L. Harding
Principal Engineer
One of the founders of Hydrosphere, Mr. Harding has more than 35 years' experience in water resources engineering. He has successfully directed engineers, scientists, and programmers in hundreds of projects spanning the breadth of water resources engineering, planning and management.
Mr. Harding combines his understanding and interest in water resources engineering with software development expertise: he has supervised the design, development, and use of hydrologic models, decision support systems, hydraulic models, water-quality models, geographic information systems and databases.
Mr. Harding has been project manager on multiple water management studies of the Colorado River basin. These projects have involved the application of network optimization, stochastic hydrology, record extension using tree-ring hydrology, forecasting, risk analysis, Monte Carlo techniques and other statistical approaches. He has also managed the development of a water resources planning model for the Seattle Water Department and a database for use in support of interstate negotiations in the Alabama-Coosa-Talapoosa/Apalachicola -Chattahoochee-Flint River system. He currently manages the ongoing development of a strategic water resources plan and water resources model for the Arkansas River for the City of Aurora, Colorado.
His litigation experience includes serving as an expert witness in original-jurisdiction interstate compact litigation between Nebraska and Wyoming and serving as an expert witness regarding the fate of toxic compounds in water distribution systems and reconstructing human intakes of toxic compounds in several major US cities.
Mr. Harding also has experience with evaluation of ambient water quality conditions, particularly inorganic water chemistry and water temperature, and related NPDES permitting issues.
Application of GIS to water resources investigations is one of Mr. Harding's particular interests. He has managed the development of extensive spatial databases of parcel and land use data and their application for estimating municipal water use. He pioneered the development of nationwide databases of streamflow, meteorological and water quality data. He is skilled in large-scale data conversion, coordinate systems, issues of precision and scale, data sources, and the design and development of relational databases.
Mr. Harding's work has been published in numerous conference proceedings and in the refereed journals: Water Resources Research, Water Resources Bulletin and Industrial Wastes. He was the project manager and a principal author of the Incentive Pricing Handbook for Agricultural Water Districts, written for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. Following up on that work, Mr. Harding assisted the Mid-Pacific Region of Reclamation in developing Incentive Pricing Best Management Practice for Agricultural Irrigation Districts.
Mr. Harding has been the Chair and a member of the Professional Advisory Board of the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering at the University of Colorado. He is a registered Professional Engineer in Colorado and holds a BS in Civil Engineering from the University of Colorado.