Philip Bedient
· Herman Brown Professor of EngineeringRice University · Civil and Environmental Engineering
Active 1964–2025
About
Dr. Philip B. Bedient is the Herman Brown Professor of Engineering at Rice University, where he also serves as the Director of the SSPEED Center and is a member of the Ken Kennedy Institute. He teaches and conducts research in surface water hydrology, disaster management, and flood modeling and prediction systems. Over the past 45 years, he has directed more than 100 research projects and authored over 200 articles in journals and conference proceedings. He is the lead author of the textbook 'Hydrology and Floodplain Analysis (6th Ed)', which is used in over 75 universities across the United States. Dr. Bedient has received numerous honors, including the Herman Brown endowed Chair of Engineering, election as a Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), and awards from the American Institute of Hydrology and Shell. With four decades of experience working on flood and flood prediction problems in the U.S., he routinely utilizes advanced hydrologic models such as HEC-HMS, HEC-RAS, and VFLO. He developed one of the first radar-based rainfall flood alert systems (FAS5) in the U.S. for the Texas Medical Center and currently operates several FAS systems in Texas. In 2007, he founded the SSPEED Center at Rice University, which involves a team of seven universities and 15 investigators, focusing on regional flood mitigation strategies for the Houston-Galveston area. His research includes evaluating flood issues across multiple states and modeling the impacts and mitigation strategies for Hurricane Harvey (2017). Dr. Bedient has also led major outreach activities, including organizing conferences and establishing international technical exchanges, notably with TU Delft and the UK.
Research topics
- Computer Science
- Environmental science
- Engineering
- Computer Security
- Geography
- Operations research
- Biology
- Environmental resource management
- Computer network
- Medicine
- Environmental planning
- Telecommunications
- Transport engineering
- Operations management
- Genetics
- Business
- Virology
- Civil engineering
- Geotechnical engineering
- Geology
- Risk analysis (engineering)
Selected publications
Characterizing spatiotemporal trends in extreme precipitation in Southeast Texas
UNC Libraries · 2025-07-04
articleOpen accessHurricane Risk Assessment of Petroleum Infrastructure in a Changing Climate
UNC Libraries · 2025-07-11
articleOpen accessHurricanes threaten the petroleum industry in the United States and are expected to be influenced by climate change. This study presents an integrated framework for hurricane risk assessment of petroleum infrastructure under changing climatic conditions, calculating risk in terms of monetary loss. Variants of two synthetic probabilistic storms and one historical storm (Hurricane Ike) are simulated using the SWAN+ADCIRC model, representing a range of potential scenarios of impacts of a changing climate on hurricane forward speed and sea-level rise given uncertainties in climate projections. Model outputs inform an infrastructure impact and cascading economic loss analysis that incorporates various sources of uncertainty to estimate five types of losses sustained by petroleum facilities in surge events: land value loss, process-unit damage loss, cost of spill clean-up and repair of aboveground storage tanks, productivity loss, and civil fines. The proposed risk assessment framework is applied as a case study to seven refineries along the Houston Ship Channel (HSC), a densely-industrialized corridor in Texas. The results reveal that either an increase in mean sea level or a decrease in storm forward speed increases the maximum water elevations in the HSC for storms that produce maximum wind setup in Galveston Bay (FEMA 33 and FEMA 36), resulting in larger economic loss estimates. The role of refinery features such as storage capacity and average elevation of the refinery and its critical equipment in the refinery response to hurricane hazards is studied, and the probability distribution of refinery total loss and the loss risk profile in different hurricane scenarios are discussed. Loss estimates are presented, demonstrating the effects of hurricane forward speed and sea level on the losses for the refineries as well as the HSC. Such a framework can enable hurricane risk assessment and loss estimation for petroleum infrastructure to inform future policies and risk mitigation strategies. Potential policy implications for a region like the HSC are highlighted herein as an illustration.
Multiphase Contamination and Free Product Recovery
2024-12-02
book-chapterPump-and-Treat Systems for Groundwater Contaminants
2024-12-02 · 1 citations
book-chapter2024-12-02
book-chapter2024-12-02
book-chapterBioremediation of Contaminated Soils and Sludges
2024-12-02
book-chapterSubsurface Contaminant Transport
2024-12-02
book-chapter2024-12-02
book-chapterDarcy's Law and Subsurface Flow
2024-12-02
book-chapter
Frequent coauthors
- 42 shared
Zheng Fang
The University of Texas at Arlington
- 37 shared
Hanadi S. Rifai
- 28 shared
Baxter E. Vieux
University of Oklahoma
- 27 shared
Antonia Sebastian
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- 24 shared
Andrew Juan
Texas A&M University
- 20 shared
Andrea Zimmer
- 19 shared
Katherine B. Ensor
Rice University
- 19 shared
Jude A. Benavides
Awards & honors
- Fellow ASCE (2006)
- C.V. Theis Award from the American Institute of Hydrology (2…
- Shell Distinguished Chair in Environmental Science (1988 to…
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