Dr. Roger Bales has been approved as an Adjunct Professor, effective July 1, 2013. Dr. Bales will contribute to CEE's Environmental Engineering program. His teaching is in the area of hydrology and climate.
As Co-Lead on the water initiative at CITRIS (Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society), Dr. Bales works closely with other water scientists and engineers at Berkeley and the other CITRIS campuses on water information systems. His own research currently focuses on the Sierra Nevada, which supplies a major fraction of the state's water supply.
Dr. Bales is a founding Professor of Engineering at UC Merced, and is Director of the university's Sierra Nevada Research Institute. He was Professor of Hydrology and Water Resources at the University of Arizona 1984-2003, before moving to UC Merced. He has a Ph.D. from Caltech, M.S. in CEE from UC Berkeley and B.S. from Purdue. He is a registered engineer in California
Dr. Bales is principal investigator on the NSF-supported Southern Sierra Critical Zone (CZO) Observatory, a long-term, multi-campus, multi-disciplinary research program investigating how mountain soil and regolith properties develop over geologic time and interact with shorter-term climate variability and ecosystem behavior. Understanding from the CZO is used to predict how environmental change, including human disturbances, fire, pests and changes in climate influence water resources, material flows and forest health. He is also involved in several other projects at the intersection of water resources, forests and climate.
He has also carried out research on polar glaciology and climate, and other aspects of hydrology. Dr. Bales has been active on several professional committees and boards, and his research is frequently featured in press reports.