2. GEOGLOWS Model Formulation

Presenter: Dr. Riley Hales
Date: 23 September 2025

Description:

An overview of the River Forecast System (RFS) model version 2 to help users understand model inputs and the basics of how the RFS model works.

About the Author

Riley Hales is a researcher in hydrology and river hydraulics emphasizing in numerical modeling. His research focuses on building large numerical models in hydraulics and hydrology; both physical, and statistical or machine learning models. His areas of expertise includes hydrology, hydraulics, 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 the River Forecast System, a global hydrologic model providing forecast and hindcast river discharge predictions at 7 million river reaches worldwide. RFS data services around 40 million annual data downloads, or averaging over 100k per day. He has provided hydrologic capacity building and training in more than a dozen countries in Central and South America, Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. RFS 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, and training data for machine learning workflows.