Riley Hales is a researcher in hydrology and river hydraulics emphasizing in numerical modeling. His research focuses primarily on building large scale numerical models which are user accessible and application ready for sustainable use in underdeveloped regions. He has expertise in physical and statistical models, machine learning, remote sensing, high performance computing, geographic information systems, web development, and decision support tools. He received his doctoral degree in Civil Engineering from Brigham Young University.
Dr Hales is the Technical Director of GEOGloWS where he has built two generations of a global hydrologic model providing forecast and hindcast river discharge predictions at 7 million river reaches worldwide. The model receives more than 60 thousand requests for data each day. He has provided hydrologic capacity building and training in more than a dozen countries in Central and South America, Africa, throughout the Middle East, and South Asia. GEOGloWS data is used by the local water and disaster management agencies in these countries use for many applications including flood preparation, early warning systems, agricultural planning, water quality monitoring, training data for machine learning workflows, and more.