CEE’s Colin Gleason Serves as Distinguished Visiting Professor at University of Bristol in England

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Colin Gleason

Associate Professor Colin Gleason of the UMass Amherst Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) Department is presently serving at the University of Bristol (Bristol) in the United Kingdom as the Benjamin Meaker Distinguished Visiting Professor. Gleason, the Armstrong Professional Development Professor at UMass, will be hosted by Professor Paul Bates of Bristol, and together they will study, parse, and apply data from the current National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission.

Gleason began his stint at Bristol on February 28th and will work there as a visiting professor until June 1st before continuing for another three months under separate funding. 

NASA’s SWOT satellite mission – which it launched on December 15, 2022, with the cooperation of the Centre National d’Etudes Spatial, Canadian Space Agency, and the UK Space Agency – promises to reveal unprecedented observations about water and climate on a global scale.

As the Bristol website says here about the pioneering collaboration between Gleason and Bates, “Hydrology is a fundamental science for both climate (as the expression of water and energy fluxes) and society (which needs to know how much water is available for agricultural, municipal, industrial, and ecological use). SWOT is also a game-changing instrument for flood mapping, Dr. Bates’ specialty. Our plan is to produce some of the first statement-making papers from SWOT.”

Gleason had worked on the NASA project for more than a decade preparing for the 2022 SWOT launch. Currently, he is the lead academic scientist for Calibration and Validation of U.S. Inland Hydrology for the SWOT satellite and a member of the Science Team for the SWOT program. 

Also, serving as co-lead of discharge production for SWOT, Gleason and his lab run software, developed by almost 30 scientists from around the globe, to convert raw data on water height and extent into information on river discharge—the actual flux of water.

As the Bristol website explains, “Dr. Gleason generates several mission products for NASA, and he will bring this production software and knowledge to the exchange to help Professor Bates and others rapidly adapt to the constantly shifting data volumes and products that are inevitable in this early period of SWOT’s life.”

Among many other awards, Gleason is a National Science Foundation CAREER awardee, a NASA New Investigator, and winner of the 2024 American Geophysical Union Early Career Award in Hydrology. 

Gleason is a global fluvial hydrologist who applies hydraulics and geomorphology to basic fluvial problems of water quantity and quality from primary data via modelling and data assimilation. He focuses on translating process-based hydrology and geochemistry to global scales through extensive Arctic fieldwork, satellite-data processing, and geomorphically informed modelling and data assimilation.

As Gleason says about his field, “Human beings have co-evolved with freshwater resources since civilization began. Water is everything for people—food, energy, drinking water, industry. I get overwhelmed by the amount of stuff we don’t know and should know.”

While serving at Bristol, Gleason will give workshops on: SWOT 101- accessing and assessing SWOT data and its use in the sciences; academic publishing and professionalization; and opportunities for careers in the U.S. academic system. He will also deliver a lecture on “Everything everywhere all at once: satellites and the new global river hydrology.” (March 2025)