Ed Clark
Director of the National Water Center and Deputy Director of the Office of Water Prediction
NOAA NWS
Edward Clark is the director of NOAA’s National Water Center (NWC) in Tuscaloosa, AL and deputy director of the National Weather Service’s (NWS) Office of Water Prediction (OWP). As director, Clark oversees operations, guides the management and strategic direction of the Office of Water Prediction, and facilitates collaborative efforts to evolve NOAA’s water prediction capabilities. Under Clark’s leadership, OWP and the NWC have continuously grown as an organization to directly enhance the mission of NOAA. Since 2016, there have been rapid advancements made to improve water resources including, but not limited to:
- NOAA’s first hydrologic modeling framework, National Water Model - which includes expansion to Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands with expansion to Alaska to be provided in 2023
- An interagency Next Generation Water Resources Modeling Framework
- The first ever NWS Cooperative Institute focused on operational hydrology known as the “Cooperative Institute for Research to Operations in Hydrology” (CIROH)
- Signed Flood Inundation Mapping Construct of Operations
- Collaboration with federal agencies as well as academia to support 8 years of the National Water Center’s Innovator’s Program through the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Sciences, Inc, to explore and develop next generation national flood forecasting.
Before becoming NWC director, Clark served as OWP’s Geo-Intelligence Division Director. In this role, he worked closely with multiple federal agency partners, including USGS, USACE and FEMA on a variety of projects associated with the Integrated Water Resources Science and Services consortium.
Earlier in his career, Ed served in NWS headquarters as the National Flash Flood Service Leader in the Analyze, Forecast, and Support Office. Clark began his career in the NWS as an operational hydrologic forecaster, working as a senior hydrologist at the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center in Salt Lake City for seven years. He is a civil engineer by training with an emphasis in water resources and earned his Bachelor of Science degree in civil and environmental engineering from the University of Utah.