Dr. Charles Vörösmarty

Charles Vörösmarty is a Research Full Professor at the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space at the University of New Hampshire. He serves as founder and Director of its Water Systems Analysis Group. His research interests focus on the development of computer models and geospatial data sets used in synthesis studies of the interactions among the water cycle, climate, biogeochemistry and anthropogenic activities. His studies are built around local, regional, continental to global-scale modeling of water balance, discharge, constituent fluxes in river systems, and the analysis of the impacts of large-scale water engineering on the terrestrial water cycle.

Dr. Vörösmarty serves on several national and international panels, including the Arctic Research Consortium of the United States (ARCUS), the ARCSS Committee (AC), the Arctic HYDRA International Polar Year (IPY) Planning Team, and the Steering Committee of the newly formed Global Water System Project (as co-Chair. In the US, he served on an NRC panel to review NASA's polar geophysical data sets and is co-Chair of the NSF-Arctic CHAMP hydrology initiative. The Water Systems Analysis Group serves as the Northern Eurasia Earth Science Partnership Initiative (NEESPI) Focus Research Center on Hydrology. He is also a Convening Lead Author on global fresh water resources for the recently-completed Millennium Assessment. He has assembled regional and continental-scale hydro-meteorological data compendia, including the largest single such collection, Arctic-RIMS covering northern Eurasia and North America). For the United Nations he served as consultant to the 24-agency UN World Water Assessment Programme and represented the International Council of Scientific Unions at recent UN Commission on Sustainable Development meetings.

On the educational front, he has brought to the classroom an innovative blending of research and formal instruction, including preparation of peer-reviewed publications (including to AMBIO and Science) by class members at the graduate level and hands-on hydrological modeling for undergraduates. Student advising is also central to his educational contributions.

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