Biography
Arjen is interested in the physical processes that shape our surroundings, especially the flow of water, and the proper management of our natural resources. He is a hydrologist and remote sensing analyst with a special interest in understanding high river discharges and floods. He combines hydrological knowledge with modelling, data-driven approaches and satellite observations, on topics ranging from water resource management to flood forecasting. He is currently working at the Operational Water Management & Early Warning department of Deltares, an applied research institute based in the Netherlands.
Arjen has a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering, with a minor on remote sensing and geospatial processing, and completed his master’s degree in hydrology at Utrecht University. For his bachelor thesis he updated a data-driven model used operationally at Rijkswaterstaat, the Dutch Directorate-General for Public Works and Water Management. For his MSc thesis he created a fully two-way coupled setup between a global hydrological model and a detailed hydraulic model, enabling exchange of information during model runs. This was used as a starting point for a now completed PhD research.
Since then, he has increased his expertise in hydrological forecasting. Additionally, he improved his knowledge of remote sensing and became an expert in the use of Google Earth Engine. Recently, he has also added artificial intelligence to his toolkit, applying this on large geospatial datasets including those obtained from earth observation.
At Deltares, he does projects all across the globe, many of which focus on early warning and disaster relief, as well as more long-term planning and adaptation. He has helped set up flood forecasting system using the Delft-FEWS platform in various countries and built operational earth observation tools for flood mapping and other water-related applications.
