James “Jim” Smith, the William and Edna Macaleer Professor of Engineering and Applied Science and professor of civil and environmental engineering, is transferring to emeritus status at the end of this academic year after serving as an active member of Princeton’s faculty for thirty-two years. Jim is widely recognized as a leading expert on flood hydrology, urban hydrometeorology, and hydroclimatology. 

Jim was born in Inverness, Florida, and was raised in Inverness; Athens, Georgia; and Statesboro, Georgia. He attended the University of Georgia and received a bachelor of science in mathematics in 1974. He earned his Ph.D. in 1981 at Johns Hopkins University, where his studies spanned mathematics and environmental engineering and resulted in a doctoral dissertation about the statistics of rainfall frequency, intensity, and duration. While Jim was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins, he was highly influenced by M. Gordon “Reds” Wolman, an expert on river geomorphology, and Jim had the good fortune to be invited on Reds’ field research excursions. The combination of interests in stochastic processes, rainfall, rivers, and surface water hydrology would shape Jim’s research arc for the next forty years. 

In the 1980s, Jim was a research scientist in hydrometeorology at the Hydrologic Research Laboratory at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). In 1985, he spent one year as a Fulbright scholar in Amsterdam at the Center for Mathematics and Computer Science, where he was appointed with a preeminent group that worked on extreme value statistical theory. 

In the late 1980s, Jim received a phone call from the late Eric Wood, then the Susan Dod Brown Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Princeton University. At that time, Wood was hiring faculty for the new Program in Water Resources, now called Environmental Engineering and Water Resources (EEWR). Wood told Jim that his expertise spanning stochastic processes and hydrology would make him a perfect addition to the department, which was newly designed to bridge civil engineering and operations research, and had recently been named the Department of Civil Engineering and Operations Research (CEOR). At first, Jim declined; he was happy at NOAA, and he and his wife, Mary Lynn Baeck, had just started a family. Wood persisted, and in 1990 Jim agreed to join the Princeton faculty. 

Jim was assigned to teach a graduate course on probability and statistics with applications spanning civil engineering, water resources, and operations research. To strengthen the new water resources program, he introduced an undergraduate course called “Environmental Fluid Dynamics,” covering all processes of the hydrologic cycle. The course was later renamed “Hydrology: Water and Climate” and remains a core part of the undergraduate curriculum in civil and environmental engineering. In the mid-2000s, Jim co-taught, with the late David Billington, the Gordon Y.S. Wu Professor of Engineering, a novel course titled “Rivers and the Regional Environment.” In that course, students from across the University examined river basins in the United States and their redevelopment. 

On June 27, 1995, Jim received an urgent phone call from his colleague Andy Miller about a severe flood in Madison County, Virginia. A severe thunderstorm had produced extreme rainfall on the steep hillslopes in the upper drainage basin of the Rapidan River, on the eastern flank of the Blue Ridge mountains. The storm produced as much as thirty inches of rain over sixteen hours. Downstream, the storm produced rockslides, flooding, and debris-flows with consequent destruction of houses, roads, utilities, livestock, and crops. That storm ultimately became a pivot point in Jim’s career. In 1996, Jim and his research team published a groundbreaking paper, “Catastrophic rainfall from an upslope thunderstorm in the Central Appalachians: The Rapidan Storm of June 27, 1995.” By the mid-1990s, Jim was working closely with his wife, Mary Lynn Baeck, who developed the analytical tools for quantitative assessments of rainfall estimates for the Rapidan storm. The paper had tremendous impact, changing the way people in hydrometeorology think about extreme rainfall events and the hydraulic computations of watershed discharge profiles based on radar rainfall data. 

A decade after Jim joined Princeton, the CEOR department split into the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) and the Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering (ORFE). In 2004, Jim became the CEE departmental representative, now called the director of undergraduate studies. One of the first things he did as departmental representative was meet with CEE undergraduate seniors. The department was at the time divided into civil and environmental engineering tracks. Jim has a vivid memory of the students articulating the importance of a more unified course of study. This marked the beginning of a long transition to create a unified CEE department, and included work by Jim when he became chair of the department in 2011. 

Starting around 2000, Jim began working on urban hydrology. He became a member of the multi-investigator Baltimore Ecosystem Study, funded through the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Longterm Ecological Research (LTER) Program, in partnership with the University of Maryland and other institutions. Jim’s involvement in that research center acknowledged that urban environments are unique hydrologic systems. His role in this center was to study the connection between hydrologic events, such as storms and floods, and how they are altered by urbanization. 

In 2007, Jim was invited to be part of Princeton’s MIRTHE Photonics Sensing Center, an NSF Engineering Research Center originally established by Claire Gmachl. MIRTHE advanced and applied photonic sensing technologies for environmental, medical, and security applications. For Jim, “the ten years with MIRTHE was one of the most challenging but also enjoyable experiences.” It allowed testing of novel sensor devices for observation of urban atmospheres, opening a new line of inquiry about the role of urban pollution and urban heat in modification of precipitation. Jim and his colleagues established the Broadmead Field site on Princeton’s campus for measurements of chemical, thermal, and atmospheric fluxes. In 2008, novel MIRTHE instruments were tested in an urban setting when the team traveled to Beijing to examine the impact of aerosols, such as from pollution, on precipitation. 

A continuous thread throughout Jim’s forty-year research career is his study of extreme events, starting with his 1981 Ph.D. dissertation on point process models of rainfall, and continuing with the study of Hurricane Ida in September 2021. An important change over that time is the transition away from characterizations based solely on extreme value statistics to insights based on hydrometeorological mechanistic modeling. In 2018, Jim published a seminal paper on “extreme floods” that had a strong analytical component of atmospheric modeling, which enabled the investigators to ask the question: Are these floods extremes of known processes, or are they something fundamentally new? This question re-emerges in his most recent paper on “strange storms,” which found that something fundamentally new and different that we have not seen happened on September 1, and in a warming climate, extremes are going to change in ways that we don’t expect. 

Jim became the chair of the CEE department in 2011. During the six years that he held that position, Jim made transformative faculty hires, including Ning Lin, Amilcare Porporato, Ian Bourg, and Claire White. These hires established key connections between CEE and research centers and strengthened the center of the department, which spans civil and environmental engineering around the area of urban systems and urban resilience. 

Jim is most proud of his students and postdocs who learned through rich research experiences while they were at Princeton and have gone on to great achievements. Among the most notable are Peter Nelson, Alex Ntelekos, Matthias Steiner, and Gabriele Villarini. 

Jim has been honored with numerous recognitions and awards over the years. The award that is most meaningful to him is the Hydrologic Sciences Medal from the American Meteorological Society (AMS), which he was awarded in 2019 for his exceptional contributions to understanding physical and statistical aspects of flood hydrology, urban hydrometeorology, and hydroclimatology. 

Written by members of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering faculty.