Daren Harmel is the recipient of the 2009 New Holland Young Researcher Award for his outstanding achievements and contributions to agricultural hydrology and water quality research.

 

Harmel, an agricultural engineer with the USDA-ARS Grassland, Soil and Water Research Laboratory, Temple, Texas, is recognized internationally as a leader in hydrologic and water quality measurement methodology.  He conceived and developed foundational guidance for water quality sampling on small watersheds, which has been applied by federal, state, and local agencies, universities, and consulting firms in project implementation, product design, and regulatory formulation.  In related research, he developed and published an uncertainty estimation framework and software tool specifically for hydrology and water quality data.  The framework and resulting fundamental uncertainty estimates have been incorporated into model evaluation guidance developed by ARS and university researchers and resulted in a novel statistical method that incorporates measurement uncertainty in model evaluation.

 

Harmel has authored or coauthored more than 50 refereed journal articles, 6 book chapters, and numerous conference proceedings and other technical publications.  A 14-year member of ASABE, he has provided leadership to the Soil and Water division by chairing the SW-04 Program and SW-06 Paper Awards committees and the SW-21 Hydrology group and serving on the SW-05 Publications Review and P-511 Refereed Publications committees.  He is the incoming chair of the Soil and Water Division Executive (SW-01) and Steering Committees (SW-02).  He currently serves as associate editor for two ASABE journals and received a 2007 ASABE Superior Paper award.  

 

His other professional activities include representing USDA-ARS on the National Water Monitoring Council Methods and Data Comparability Board and serving as an adjunct professor in the Biological and Agricultural Engineering Department, Texas A&M University.