Stanley Alan Leake, 71, of Tucson, Arizona, passed away on September 19.
Leake was an Arizona-born-and-bred groundwater hydrologist, who, during his 42-plus year career with the U.S. Geological Survey, impacted the field of hydrology on an international scale.
Leake, who received the 2014 NGWA John Hem Award for Excellence in Science & Engineering and authored and reviewed multiple papers for NGWA’s Groundwater® through the years, worked for more than four decades on groundwater and surface water issues affecting his state. He is well known in the United States for his publications on stream capture and groundwater/surface water interactions.
Leake made significant contributions in the area of groundwater modeling. He was a renowned developer for USGS’s modeling software, MODFLOW — a staple in the hydrologist’s toolkit. His subsidence and compaction sub-packages for MODFLOW (SUB and SUB-WT) are widely used throughout the United States and other countries.
Leake contributed heavily to subsidence and grid-refinement techniques in MODFLOW and authored the user guide for SUB-WT. His other innovations include the use of superposition groundwater models to gain elegant insights into aquifer systems.
In the area of water resources, Leake’s publication with Bill Alley, Ph.D., The Journey from Safe Yield to Sustainability, continues to be a highly influential article discussing concepts of safe yield and sustainability of groundwater. Alley is the NGWA director of science and technology.
Leake received the 2017 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Arizona Hydrological Society.