Strengthening water partnerships: USACE water manager partners with Northwest River Forecast Center

For the past four years, Kyle Comanor has managed water flows at dams near and within the greater Seattle area. In his role as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ (USACE) Seattle District’s senior water manager for western Washington, communicating with other agencies, especially those who forecast, is critical in making water management decisions that positively impact recreational water use, flood risk reduction and public safety.

To strengthen interagency communication and collaboration, Comanor recently participated in a historic partnership with the Northwest River Forecast Center (NWRFC) in Portland, Oregon. During the 30-day temporary duty assignment, Comanor shadowed forecasters, learned the specifics of how their forecasting models work, reviewed models from recent flooding events and shared how the Seattle District uses those forecasts to support water management operations.

Comanor’s experience marks the first time in ten years a USACE water manager has spent an extended temporary duty assignment at the NWRFC – and the first time the center has hosted a USACE hydrologist from outside of the Portland area.

“I think as a pilot, it was incredibly successful,” Comanor said. “But we also didn't have anyone to ask how this should look or how this could look – we had to invent it. Just being able to learn so much of, not just the tools and the technical piece, but the daily routine and the daily rhythm that goes through one of these offices was very valuable.”

The Northwest River Forecast Center, one of 13 National Weather Service (NWS) hydrologic centers in the United States, maintains and operates hydrologic models to provide river and water resource forecasts in support of the NWS mission of protecting lives and enhancing the national economy. The center works with agencies that manage water, such as USACE, to ensure the best possible operations of reservoir systems in the Pacific Northwest.

The idea of sending a USACE water manager down to the NWRFC was discussed in the Seattle District’s Hydrology and Hydraulics branch before, but after back-to-back atmospheric rivers in Washington caused historic flooding in December 2025, Comanor reached out to see if the visit would be possible.

“[The historic flooding] just made everyone here so much more aware of the River Forecast Center in our water management mission, especially when we're doing flood risk reduction with our projects,” Comanor said.
Seattle District’s water management section chief, David Doll, supported the opportunity for Comanor to visit the NWRFC.

“The Seattle District relies heavily on NWRFC forecasts to make real-time reservoir management decisions, which is critical during extreme weather like the historic December 2025 flood event,” Doll said. “Furthermore, the NWRFC serves as the primary public-facing source for information regarding our planned reservoir operations, making aligned data feeds and tight inter-agency communication absolutely vital for public safety.”

“Kyle's temporary duty at the NWRFC was essential for a deeper understanding of how flood forecasting and real-time reservoir operations work together.”

The Seattle District water management team provides reservoir regulation at dams and locks throughout the region in Washington, Idaho and Montana. Seattle district engineers and scientists monitor weather conditions and water levels to determine the appropriate volume of water to release from dams or store in reservoirs to meet multiple objectives at each project. These objectives include flood risk management, economic benefits and environmental stewardship.

Across the country, communication between the National Weather Service’s River Forecast Centers and USACE districts is critical, especially during flood events. USACE districts use information from the centers, along with data from other organizations such as the local weather service, the U.S. Geological Survey, the National Resources Conservation Service, and more, to determine when to begin releasing water from its reservoirs to make room for water from upstream.

During a flood, USACE water managers need to know how “full” the rivers along its dams are - to know how much water they can release downstream and to know how much water they can expect to come into the dam’s reservoir from upstream. RFCs provide a key piece of the puzzle of water management, issuing river and reservoir inflow forecasts that include the height and timing of the flood crest with respect to official flood thresholds. Then, when USACE releases water, they inform the RFC of how much water is being released downstream so they can update their public forecasts.

“They did archive the December flood for me in their models so I could go look at a bunch of saved versions of their models at different times during the event so that I could see what they were doing and how they handled the forecast uncertainty because that's the name of our game,” Comanor said. “We're always reasoning under uncertainty and people at the RFC and the products they produce help us manage that uncertainty better.”
Comanor says he found the opportunity valuable – he learned how to run their forecasting models and how to access them remotely, which will be helpful for his work back in Seattle.

“We identified some really powerful ways to work together more in the future to integrate them more into, at least for me, west-side Washington water management – which is why I think we want to push for every water manager to have this kind of experience,” Comanor said. “They were able to tailor a lot of their information and training for me on the basins that I’m most interested in and responsible for, but they showed me the big picture too which was great.”

Water management requires regional and international coordination of reservoir systems, coordinating water resource management with other government agencies, non-federal agencies and a vast array of water users. Comanor, who previously worked in King County’s flood, river, and floodplain management section for 20 years before working at USACE, is committed to enhancing relationships with agencies and partners that work in water.

“An essential quality for a water manager is the ability to create relationships and maintain seamless communication with partners,” Doll said. “Kyle absolutely has the skills needed for this; his initiative to create this opportunity at the NWRFC to understand their forecasting models, while simultaneously presenting our own operational constraints to their staff, demonstrates a commitment to continuous improvement of communication.”

Comanor’s favorite aspect of his job is the variety of work that comes along with working with water.
“I mean, you might think, ‘okay, so you have a dam, all you get to do is decide how much the hold time is to release and that's pretty straightforward,’” Comanor said. “But there's so many other spaces that we work in with respect to coordinating with federal and state government services, tribes, and other partners - and the ability for me to work on flood risk reduction with Howard A. Hanson and Mud Mountain Dams, and to also get to work on recreation and water quality at Lake Washington Ship Canal.”

Moving forward, the Seattle District’s water management team members – Comanor, Doll, and a host of other hydrologists – are eager to continue this relationship with the NWRFC. For example, they invited forecasters from the NWRFC to their annual regulator training, to better understand how the forecasters use USACE data and to explain how USACE integrates their forecasts into its reservoir management.

“It's important for us at the Army Corps to recognize both how much we bring to our partners in achieving our mission and how much they bring to us,” Comanor said. “By strengthening our partnerships, we can get more good work done by leveraging resources that we have.”