Hydrosphere Staff
James T. McCord
Senior Engineering Manager
Dr. McCord has over 25 years' experience in hydrology and water resources investigations. He specializes in characterization of groundwater and surface water systems, vadose zone hydrology, contaminant hydrology, numerical modeling of hydrologic systems, surface water-groundwater interaction, water rights, river basin planning and management, stochastic hydrology, and geostatistics. He has been involved in numerous water resources and environmental contamination studies in New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Texas, California, Washington, Idaho, and Missouri.
Dr. McCord has served as project manager for a number of complex water resources projects requiring multidisciplinary technical teams with activities ranging from field sampling to construction of numerical flow and transport simulators. Most recently, he has managed the development and application of a three-dimensional model of the Denver Basin aquifer system to support conjunctive use water supply planning for the southern metropolitan Denver region, and has served as joint lead on the Pecos River Hydrology Working Group. In the latter role, he has been closely involved in the development and application of linked surface water and groundwater models used to evaluate NEPA alternatives.
Prior to joining Hydrosphere, Dr. McCord spent seven years as a senior member of the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories, where he performed and managed hydrologic investigations for a wide variety of DOE and Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) programs.
A recognized expert in vadose zone hydrology, Dr. McCord has co-authored the textbook, Vadose Zone Processes, and taught short courses on this topic for the NRC and the International Atomic Energy Authority. His work has been published in numerous conference proceedings and in the refereed journals: Water Resources Research, Ground Water, Transport in Porous Media, Journal of Contaminant Hydrology, Journal of Hydrology, and Hydrological Processes. He recently completed the comprehensive Unsaturated Zone Hydrology chapter for UNESCO's Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems.
Since 1991, Dr. McCord has served as adjunct professor of Earth Science at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology and as adjunct professor of Civil Engineering at the University of New Mexico.
Dr. McCord is a registered Professional Engineer in New Mexico. He holds a PhD in Geoscience and an MS in Hydrology from the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology and a BS in Civil Engineering from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.