Katie van Werkhoven

Katie van Werkhoven, PhD, specializes in hydrologic forecasting and watershed systems analysis, with expertise spanning flood and reservoir inflow forecasting, model development and evaluation, and operational forecast applications. She has led and contributed to projects across operational, academic, and consulting environments, with a focus on translating hydrologic and environmental models into forecasts that directly support real-world decision-making.

Dr. van Werkhoven serves as the institutional lead for RTI under the NOAA Cooperative Institute for Research to Operations in Hydrology (CIROH), where she leads RTI’s strategy, partnerships, and technical contributions to strengthen NOAA’s water prediction capabilities. She is a principal investigator and co-investigator on multiple CIROH projects to improve flash flood forecasting, large-scale model and forecast evaluation, research-to-operations (R2O) practices, and multi-modeling approaches for hydrologic forecasting.

Since 2020, Dr. van Werkhoven has directly supported the evaluation program within the NOAA Office of Water Prediction (OWP), helping to design and implement OWP’s evaluation strategies that inform operational forecasting. Her work emphasizes that forecast skill alone does not ensure value — forecasts must be evaluated based on their usefulness for decisions under uncertainty, including through rapid post-event evaluations that connect forecast performance to real-world actions and outcomes. She has developed and applied tools for these evaluations and works with OWP to design approaches for continental-scale assessment of hydrologic simulations and forecasts. She also initiated a study to investigate the effectiveness of flood warnings during Hurricane Helene in Western North Carolina and has supported Duke Energy in operational inflow forecasting for reservoir management since 2018.

Before joining RTI in 2017, Dr. van Werkhoven led water resources modeling efforts across a broader range of applications, including reservoir operations, water quality forecasting, climate and land use change impacts, and pollutant source assessment and mitigation. She has implemented operational hydrologic forecast systems in the United States and Central America, and spent two years with the Government of South Africa, where she implemented and operated a reservoir inflow forecasting system. These experiences continue to inform her work at RTI, ensuring that water resources modeling and forecasting approaches are grounded in the needs and constraints of practical water management.