About us

FHS was founded on the core values of professionalism, innovation, and
reliability.We seek to provide innovative and state-of-the-art solutions to hydrologic and

geospatial problems.

Our Visionary Leaders

Tara Follum

Owner, CEO

Education: B.S. Nursing, DNP

Location: Casper, WY

Biography: Tara is the co-owner and CEO for Follum Hydrologic Solutions (FHS), LLC. Over the past 13 years Tara has worked primarily in the medical field as a Registered Nurse. Tara functioned in a variety of settings including hospitals, clinics, telemedicine sites, and administration. Through the various positions she held, Tara assisted in the development and implementation of multiple programs for multiple facilities. This experience helped hone her business administration and project management skills.

In August of 2021, Tara joined her business knowledge with Mike’s engineering expertise to form FHS. Although the medical field remains a passion, her keen interest and capabilities in accounting and management have led her to take the lead role in business development for FHS.

Mike Follum, PE, PhD

Owner, COO, Principal Engineer

Education: B.S., M.S. & PhD, Civil Engineering

Licensure: PE (WY, MS)

Location: Casper, WY

Biography: Mike is the co-owner and principal engineer for Follum Hydrologic Solutions (FHS), LLC. Over the past 15+ years Mike has developed innovative solutions to hydrology and hydraulics problems by leveraging state-of-the art methods, geospatial datasets, and computer science (proficient in C, C++, and Python). After 12 years in Federal Service, he transitioned to full-time work at FHS.

Mike graduated from Sundance High School and attended the University of Wyoming where he earned a BS and MS in Civil Engineering. Mike’s M.S. Thesis was on precipitation reconstruction within the Green River Basin of Wyoming. Mike then went to work for the U.S. Army Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory (CHL) where he focused on developing tools to answer water-related questions for the U.S. Military, almost always in data-sparse environments. While providing inflow forecasts into the Kajaki Dam, Mike developed a method to more accurately simulate snowpack in remote regions, which led to a PhD Dissertation. After 10+ years with CHL, Mike moved back to Wyoming to work for the Wyoming Area Office of the Bureau of Reclamation, quickly becoming the Chief of the Water and Civil Works Branch. In 2021, Mike and his wife, Tara, formed Follum Hydrologic Solutions, LLC. Focusing on geospatial data, programming, and water resources. FHS’s primary goal is always to provide a technically relevant solution that is feasible and reliable to the client.

B.S. in Civil Engineering, University of Wyoming,
Dec 2007

M.S. in Civil Engineering, University of Wyoming,
May 2009

Ph.D. in Civil Engineering, Colorado State University,
Dec 2018

Professional Engineer, PE 20748 (Mississippi)

Supervisory Civil Engineer Mar 2020 - Dec 2021

Water and Civil Works Branch, Wyoming Area Office of Bureau of Reclamation
Civil Engineer Aug 2019 - Mar 2020

Water and Civil Works Branch, Wyoming Area Office of Bureau of Reclamation
Research Hydraulic Engineer 2009 - 2019

▪ U.S. Army Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory
Graduate Research Assistant 2007 - 2009

▪ University of Wyoming, College of Engineering

Mark Wahl, PhD

Senior Engineer (Full-Time)

Education: M.S. & PhD, Food, Agricultural, and Biological Engineering; B.S., Civil Engineering

Location: Dayton, OH

Biography: Dr. Mark Wahl spent the past ten years developing methods for delivering relevant and easily understood hydrologic information in data-sparse areas. His research has been focused on agricultural engineering (including irrigation) and large-scale hydrologic modeling frameworks. Mark holds a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from the University of Dayton and master’s and doctoral degrees in agricultural engineering from The Ohio State University. As a research fellow at Ohio State, he developed stochastic models to predict the hydraulic performance of treatment wetlands and taught several undergraduate courses.

While finishing graduate school, Mark was recruited by the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center, where he spent nearly ten years as a hydrologist at the U.S. Army Coastal and Hydraulics Lab. He was a principal investigator on several research efforts related to environmental security and led the military hydrology group, which was responsible for providing engineering support for contingency operations, humanitarian assistance, and disaster response efforts. Mark is the author of dozens of scientific papers, and his work is cited across academia and in the national security arena. He has presented his work to high-level decision-makers and at professional conferences around the world. In 2023, Mark started full-time with FHS working on the modeling of drought mitigation strategies in the Colorado River Basin. He has also developed canal seepage loss estimates for multiple canals in the West.

Prior to graduate school, Mark was responsible for the training and welfare of fellow Marines and Sailors while serving five years on active duty in the Marine Corps where he deployed twice. Mark is also the founder of Apogee Dayton, a non-profit providing practical alternatives for students in the Miami Valley.

Joseph Gutenson, PhD

Senior Engineer (Full-Time)

Education: M.S. & PhD, Civil Engineering; B.S., Geography

Location: Tuscaloosa, AL

Biography: Joseph has performed a variety of applied research in water resources over the last 14+ years. Currently, Joseph works in the realm of hydrologic and hydraulic computer modeling. Notably, he played a key role in operationalizing instances of the U. S. Army Corps of Engineer’s Streamflow Prediction Tool and Antecedent Precipitation Tool. Prior to his time with Follum Hydrologic Solutions (FHS), Joseph was a Chief Science Officer at a small not-for-profit, a Research Civil Engineer with the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers, a Hydrologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Weather Service, and an Environmental Support Specialist at Western Kentucky University. Beyond computer modeling, Joseph has performed a variety of environmental sampling and laboratory analysis tasks.

Joseph was born and raised in rural southeastern Kentucky. When he isn’t in the office, Joseph can be found watching Alabama Crimson Tide football with his wife or out in his backyard gardening.

Drew Allan Loney, PE, PhD

Senior Engineer & IT Support (Part-Time)

Education: B.S. Civil Engineering, M.S. & PhD Mechanical Engineering

Location: Denver, CO

Biography: Dr. Drew Allan Loney has spent a nearly a decade applying hydrodynamics, hydraulics, and hydrologic modeling and first principles to improve civil and military infrastructure. Drew holds a Bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Masters/Doctoral degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology (GeorgiaTech). His doctoral work focused on using the interaction of hydrodynamic processes to improve droplet generation in new classes of liquids.

After an undergraduate internship with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Drew was recruited by the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Starting in the Estuarine Engineering Branch, Drew was principal investigator on numerous projects spanning military and civil works. His portfolio combined civil engineering, mechanical engineering, and computer science to solve interdisciplinary infrastructure problems. Drew left ERDC in 2020 but remains in Federal service as a hydrologist working on large, water-related infrastructure.

Drew joined FHS part-time in 2021 where he supports hydraulic modeling and military-related hydraulic/hydrologic modeling. With his background in scientific software development, Drew also supports IT related infrastructure at FHS.

Nate Clifton, PE, M.S.

Senior Engineer (Part-Time)

Education: B.S. and M.S. Civil Engineering

Licensure: PE (MS, WY, CO, MT, UT, KS, NE, SD, ND)

Location: Bear River, WY

Biography: Nate has spent the past 15+ years working in water resources research, management and engineering. Nate grew up in North Mississippi before obtaining a bachelor’s and master’s degree in Civil Engineering at Mississippi State University. He started off his career working for the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center working with 1D, 2D, and 3D Hydrodynamic and Sedimentation modeling, visualization, and data analysis performed using a wide array of programs to provide innovative solutions to real world issues throughout North America. During this time, he also attended Colorado State University taking graduate courses with an emphasis on Riverine and Sedimentation in higher slope systems. Nate’s time with ERDC provided him with expertise in stream restoration, field data collection and analysis, and environmental and fish passage application.

After 9+ years with ERDC Nate moved west to take on the role of Regional Science Coordinator for the Bureau of Reclamation’s Upper Colorado Basin. Here he served as a technical expert for many water resource/ engineering issues as well as overseeing many of the region’s research programs and nationwide research teams. Currently, Nate serves as the Fish and Aquatic Organism Passage Engineer for the USFWS’s Mountain-Prairie Region (Region 6) under the National Fish Passage Program. Nate provides expert technical assistance to internal and external partners (including other agencies, state, municipalities, and private landowners), evaluating, developing, and improving fish passage, habitat restoration and planning by integrating biological data and new findings, introducing innovative technical approaches, and actively participating in landscape design approaches. In addition to his work with USFWS, Nate joined FHS part-time in 2023 where he contributes on high-end 2-D hydraulics models and GIS work.

Riley Hales, PhD

Senior Engineer (Part-Time)

Education: B.S., M.S. & PhD Civil Engineering

Location: Springville, UT

Biography: Riley Hales is a researcher in hydrology and river hydraulics emphasizing in numerical modeling. His research focuses primarily on building large scale numerical models which are user accessible and application ready for sustainable use in underdeveloped regions. He has expertise in physical and statistical models, machine learning, remote sensing, high performance computing, geographic information systems, web development, and decision support tools. He received his doctoral degree in Civil Engineering from Brigham Young University.

Dr Hales is the Technical Director of GEOGLOWS where he has built two generations of a global hydrologic model providing forecast and hindcast river discharge predictions at 7 million river reaches worldwide. The model receives more than 60 thousand requests for data each day. He has provided hydrologic capacity building and training in more than a dozen countries in Central and South America, Africa, throughout the Middle East, and South Asia. GEOGLOWS data is used by the local water and disaster management agencies in these countries for many applications including flood preparation, early warning systems, agricultural planning, water quality monitoring, training data for machine learning workflows, and more. Dr. Hales joined FHS in August of 2024, where he focuses on the development of operational flood inundation forecast systems.

Jacob Scott

Engineering Intern

Education: Highschool – Junior

Location: Casper, WY

Biography: Jacob joined FHS in August of 2022.

List of Publications:

Praskievicz, S., Carter, S., Dhondia, J., Follum, M. (2020) “Flood-inundation modeling in an operational context: Sensitivity to topographic resolution and Manning’s n”, Journal of Hydroinformatics, 22(5), 1338-1350.
Follum, M. et al. (2020). “Improved Accuracy and Efficiency of Flood Inundation Mapping of Low-, Medium-, and High-Flow Events Using the AutoRoute Model”. Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci. https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-2019-180.
Gutenson, J., Tavakoly, A., Wahl, M., Follum, M. (2020). “Comparison of generalized non-data-driven lake and reservoir routing models for global-scale hydrologic forecasting of reservoir outflow at diurnal time steps”. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 24(5), 2711-2729.
Follum, M. et al. (2019). “A comparison of snowmelt‐derived streamflow from temperature‐index and modified‐temperature‐index snow models”. Hydrological Processes. 1– 16. https://doi.org/10.1002/hyp.13545
Follum, M. et al. (2019). “Utilizing Simple Large-Scale Flood Models to Prioritize Deployment of HEC-RAS 2D Models: Case Study of Navajo Nation Flood Inundation Maps”. Flood Risk Management Newsletter, 12, 4–7.
Rajib, A., Liu, Z., Merwade, V., Tavakoly, A.A., Follum, M.L. (2019). “Towards a large-scale locally relevant flood inundation modeling framework using SWAT and LISFLOOD-FP”. Journal of Hydrology. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2019.124406.
Follum, M. et al. (2018). “Rapid Flood Inundation Modelling”. The Military Engineer, July-August Issue, 110 (715):37-38.
Afshari, S., A.A. Tavakoly, A. Rajib, X. Zheng, M. Follum, E. Omranian, B.M. Fekete (2018). “Comparison of new generation low-complexity flood inundation mapping tools with a hydrodynamic model”, Journal of Hydrology.
Follum, M. et al. (2018). “A simple temperature-based method to estimate heterogeneous frozen ground within a distributed watershed model”. Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-2017-345
Follum, M. et al. (2018). “Rapid flood inundation modeling, an application for Hurricane Maria”. The Military Engineer, July-August 2018 Issue.
Follum, M., et al. (2016). “AutoRAPID: A Model for Prompt Streamflow Estimation and Flood Inundation Mapping over Regional to Continental Extents”. Journal of the American Water Resources Association (JAWRA). DOI: 10.1111/1752-1688.12476.
Follum, M.L., E.M. Yeates, A.D. Snow, and A.A. Tavakoly (2016). “Flow Simulation in the Sava River Basin using an Open-Source Model”. Conference Paper at Crisis Management and Disaster Response Annual Conference, Sofia, Bulgaria, June 2016.
Tavakoly, A.A., A.D. Snow, C.H. David, M. Follum, D.R. Maidment, Z-L. Yang (2016). “Continental-Scale River Flow Modeling of the Mississippi River Basin Using High-Resolution NHDPlus Dataset”. JAWRA, 1-22. DOI: 10.1111/1752-1688.12456.
Wahl, M., M. Follum, A. Snow, A. Tavakoly (2016). “Developing Hydrologic Awareness”. The Military Engineer (700): 65-66.
Follum, M. et al. (2015). “A radiation-derived temperature-index snow routine for the GSSHA hydrologic model”. Journal of Hydrology, 529: 723-736. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2015.08.044.
Follum, M. (2015). “Automated method to develop a Clark synthetic unit hydrograph within ArcGIS”. Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory Technical Report ERDC/CHL CHETN-IV-104. U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center, Vicksburg, MS.
Follum, M. and C. Downer (2013). “Snow Water Equivalent Modeling Capabilities of the GSSHA Watershed Model”. Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory Technical Report ERDC/CHL TR-13-4. U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center, Vicksburg, MS.
Follum, M. (2013). “AutoRoute Rapid Flood Inundation Model”. Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory Technical Note ERDC/CHL CHETN-XI-16. U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center. Vicksburg, MS.
McKinley, G., M. Follum, M. Jourdan, G. Mason, C. LaHatte, and J. Ellis (2012). “A Route Corridor Flood Vulnerability System”. Geotechnical and Structures Laboratory Technical Report TR-12-29. U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center. Vicksburg, MS.
Tavakoly, A. A., David, C. H., Gutenson, J. L., Wahl, M., & Follum, M. (2023). Development of non-data driven reservoir routing in the routing application for parallel computatIon of discharge (RAPID) model. Environmental Modelling & Software, 105631.
Tavakoly, A. A., Gutenson, J. L., Lewis, J. W., Follum, M. L., Rajib, A., LaHatte, W. C., & Hamilton, C. O. (2021). Direct integration of numerous dams and reservoirs outflow in continental scale hydrologic modeling. Water Resources Research, 57(9), e2020WR029544.
Gutenson, J. L., Tavakoly, A. A., Wahl, M. D., & Follum, M. L. (2020). Comparison of generalized non-data-driven lake and reservoir routing models for global-scale hydrologic forecasting of reservoir outflow at diurnal time steps. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 24(5), 2711-2729.