Shelob's Lair

Schedule: I'm available for contract work as a civil engineer and surface water hydrologist. My specialty is the numerical and statistical modeling of surface water hydrologic processes. That means I use hydrologic principles to analyze watershed behavior including flood hydrology and watershed yield. In addition, I am an expert with open channel hydraulics and the hydraulics of pipelines.

In addition, I have strong statistical analysis skills. I use the R-project open source software for data analysis and statistical modeling. I write scripts for repeated analysis when appropriate using R.

What's New: Changes to the web site will be noted here until new changes occur.

03/15/2024: Oh My Goodness! I realized that I have not made any changes/updates to my webpage in nearly seven years. Let me see if I can fix that.

The last few years have been very busy for me. I will upload an updated CV before I update this page. I was engaged for several expert witness projects that have involved large design-build bridges and multi-purpose dams/reservoirs. In addition, I have been working on a couple of forensic projects for private and public parties.

I will just say I have been busy with plenty of work. It is good work.

We just finished an update of the Hydraulic Design Standards manual and training courses for Federal Highways. While not technically difficult, in general, work with the Feds always has its challenges. It was a good project and I think we produced a good product. But I am glad that one is finished.

The expert witness project for the Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge finally went to trial and the Defendant (my client) won their case. That was good work and I was confident in my application of the hydrologic and hydraulic models.

I completed another forensic project in Reno involving Swan/Lemon Lake as well. That case also went to trial and the Plaintiff (my client) won their case.

10/17/2018: I updated the linear interpolation white paper on the writings page based on some input from Richard, a friend and colleague. Instead of using VLOOKUP I am now recommending MATCH and INDEX to retrieve bounding interval values for linear interpolation.

10/13/2018: The Writings page is updated. I added a technical note on how to apply linear interpolation in Microsoft Excel in a general fashion. These are notes I developed for myself but might be useful to others tasked with a similar application.

Notes: These pages (my entire website) are hand-coded in XHTML and CSS using either vi, emacs, or BBEdit. There are no wussy code editors used here. :) Be sure to check out the Firefox standalone browser and support the open-source community. I am currently in the process of de-Googling myself because I do not want to give that corporation any more of my personal information. I use the Firefox browser in my Apple and PC computers and on my iPhone and iPad.

Finally I gave up and removed the mail-to link on the right navbar to present my email address in a fashion that is not easily snagged by spammers. I've received too much spam already.

David B. Thompson, Ph.D., P.E., P.H.