WestFAST Webinar: NASA’s Water Resources Program: Supporting Water Management in the U.S. West and Beyond

The third WestFAST webinar of 2026 will be held on Tuesday, June 16 at 12pm Mountain Time. Perry Oddo and Sean Fleming will lead the webinar, which will focus on NASA’s programs and data tools that support water management in the West.

Perry Oddo serves as the Deputy Program Manager for the NASA Water Resources Program, supporting an applied research portfolio of over 30 active projects and coordinating across interagency and international partners to improve water resource decision making through NASA research, satellite missions, and education. Prior to this role, Perry was a research scientist in the Hydrological Sciences Laboratory at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. His research has focused on near-real time flood applications, including rapid impact assessments, streamflow forecasting, and understanding the value-of-information for applied Earth observations. He has also undertaken several interagency water initiatives, including drafting NASA’s Agency Plan for the 2022 update of the U.S. Government’s Global Water Strategy and coordinating the Interagency Water Working Group Science and Applications Team (ISAT).

Sean Fleming is an associate program manager in the NASA Water Resources Program and the program scientist for the NASA Western Water Action Office.  His roles focus on putting NASA data in the hands of water resource practitioners and managers.  Sean has spent over two decades in the public, private, academic, and nonprofit sectors.  He’s a generalist with diverse interests and experience, spanning mineral exploration field work, glacier research, founding a data science startup, operational river forecasting at a hydroelectric utility, leading a team at the Meteorological Service of Canada, project and program management at Quantum Spatial and NV5 Geospatial, and R&D leadership and program management at the USDA.  Sean is also passionate about science outreach, publishing a book with Princeton University Press and op-eds in Wired and Scientific American, delivering public talks at venues ranging from ‘science pub’ events to the Smithsonian, and giving live radio and television interviews.  His volunteerism has taken him to Mexico, Ukraine, Romania, Mauritania, and Kazakhstan.