Thompson's Writings

Purpose

This page contains a set of links to files, actually documents, I've written over the years for my students and research sponsors. Links to the short articles are spread over my web pages and it seemed logical to create a single repository for those things that might be of interest to students working on a variety of projects, and perhaps others who visit these pages.

Research reports are here because I've had such a devilishly difficult time of my own finding research results that are outside of the professional literature. My suspicion is that much research work is never published in a retrievable forum. This is unfortunate because those of us who consume research, professional researchers and end-users, need access to this information. So, part of the purpose of this page is to provide a single-source for the results of my work. (There will be more when I actually start posting reports here.)

All documents on this page are in PDF format. It's a natural form under Mac OS X and the reader is widely available (and free) for most operating systems.

Short Articles

Report [2.0.1]: How to Write an Engineering Report is an article I started a long time ago about the basics of writing an engineering report. This material has not changed (much) over the span of my career. One of the principal products of a professional engineer is the written report. When I started writing, I needed a guide. This is the guide I wanted.

I had posted here a set of notes entitled Simplified Input Instructions for the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers Hydrologic Modeling System HEC-HMS for some time. However, they are seriously out of date and so the document is currently off-line. If I have a chance to update the technical note, I will and then repost it here. I believe there is a place for a primer on HEC-HMS (and probably HEC-RAS too) and it is my intent to provide such a document.

Rational Method [20Sep06]: The Rational Method is an article I wrote for my students to introduce application of the rational method as applied here in Texas. This article is in need of editing based on recent research results completed by my team and I. It's on my list…

Thesis [0.3]: How to write a Thesis is an article I wrote about the thesis-generation process. While there are books written about writing a thesis (that sounds recursive to me!), I thought I might have something to add to the mix, so here it is. It's still early in its development cycle, but it might be useful to my students and others. So, I'll share.

Linear Interpolation [Draft 10/17/2018]: Linear Interpolation Using Microsoft Excel is an article in draft form that I developed after losing my notes on a general approach to linear interpolation in a table in a spreadsheet. I used this approach when I developed a reservoir routing (modified Puls) worksheet in Excel many years ago. It is useful whenever one needs to interpolate values in regularly-spaced tables using spreadsheet software. [Note 10/17/2018: A friend reviewed this for me and suggested I use the Excel functions MATCH and INDEX instead of VLOOKUP. I updated the text (and functions) and re-uploaded my draft.]