Lecture on Groundwater Availability in Arkansas

This Friday, Sept. 14, the Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering will host Brian Clark, geographic information specialist at the U.S. Geological Survey, for a presentation on groundwater availability in Arkansas.  

The seminar will take place from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. in White Engineering Hall room 219. The seminar is free and open to the public.

For decades, the U.S. Geological Survey has developed and refined groundwater-flow models for large parts of Arkansas to evaluate issues primarily associated with sustainability. This work includes simulation of groundwater-flow in the Mississippi embayment, an area of intense irrigation and one of the largest groundwater-use areas in the Nation.

Additionally, the USGS recently released a groundwater-flow model of the Ozark Plateaus aquifer system, which includes northern Arkansas. Combined, these studies resulted in models that simulate groundwater flow in over 80 percent of Arkansas. In this talk, the background and development of each model will be presented and used to discuss differences and similarities in these important aquifer systems.

Clark has led water resource investigations of groundwater and surface water computer model simulations in 12 states and six countries. He recently served as the geographic information specialist at the USGS providing support for database construction, project management planning, and web-application design. He has also served as adjunct faculty at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock as instructor of hydrogeology. 

Clark has authored or co-authored over a dozen USGS reports and has presented at 19 professional conferences for 13 entities in 11 states, with audiences ranging from students and water resource managers to an Army colonel and brigadier general.