Michael Kane

Michael Kane is the Director of the Center for Water Resources (CWR) at RTI.  CWR’s projects involve multiple facets of water resources engineering including river forecasting and reservoir operations, river basin and water supply modeling, hydrometeorology and precipitation frequency, and hydrologic risk from floods and droughts.  Mr. Kane specializes in the development and implementation of real-time river forecasting and decision support for water resources systems. These projects involve developing systems that our clients use every day to make the best decisions about managing their water resources systems.  He has managed projects involving these systems throughout the United States—including Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and Bonneville Power Administration (BPA)—and abroad in countries such as India, Panama, El Salvador, Mexico, South Africa, Viet Nam, and Uzbekistan.

Mr. Kane started his career developing flood insurance maps for Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and was also a research hydrologist for the Office of Hydrology at the National Weather Service (NWS).  In the private sector, he has implemented basin models for the western slope of Colorado to help with management of the complex water rights operations in the state.  For most of the last 25 years, he has been involved in all aspects of implementing river forecasting systems years including:

• Leading projects to calibrate models used by the NWS River Forecast Centers
• Implementing a variety of river forecasting and reservoir operations systems for hydroelectric power agencies around the U.S.
• Transferring river forecasting technologies from the U.S. to international governments and private agencies
• Developing flood inundation maps of vulnerable areas downstream of dams