Shaun Carney

Shaun Carney is a senior water resources engineer for RTI and leads RTI’s hydrologic risk assessment practice area within the Center for Water Resources. He provides technical leadership across the Center for Water Resources with practical experience in extreme flood analysis, operational forecasting and decision support system implementation, climate change analysis, and tradeoffs analysis for hydropower reservoirs between energy grid needs and environmental impacts. His experience spans projects for the National Weather Service (NWS), US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), World Bank, the Department of Energy Water Power Technology Office (WPTO) and National Labs, various international water management agencies, and multiple private dam owners.

Mr. Carney leads and advises many of RTI’s projects assessing the probabilities of flooding and overtopping for dams and critical infrastructure. He helped develop tools to rapidly assess flood risk and downstream consequences of dam breaches that have been used in India, North Carolina, and other locations. He was the primary author of a guidance document for assessment of Probable Maximum Floods for dams in British Columbia and a separate guidance document on characterizing and communicating uncertainty in extreme floods for the CEATI Dam Safety Interest Group.

Mr. Carney’s forecast and decision support experience spans two decades and includes early work with the legacy NWS River Forecasting System (NWSRFS), the USACE Corps Water Management System (CWMS), the Deltares Flood Early Warning System (Delft-FEWS), and custom RTI applications. He has extensive experience developing a range of hydrologic, reservoir operations, and consumptive use models to support operational forecasting and decision-making.

Mr. Carney has been guiding projects assessing different aspects of climate change. For TVA, he has provided technical leadership of an assessment of the impacts of climate change on different water management sectors, supported an evaluation of impacts of climate change on extreme flood risk, and led an analysis of the river impacts of the addition of a new pumped storage facility. For WPTO, Mr. Carney has guided the development of a toolset intended to evaluate grid and environmental impacts under current and future climate and grid buildout scenarios.