Towards the preliminary Science Plan

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The process for preparing the Science Plan of the new IAHS Scientific Decade was launched during the EGU General Assembly in Vienna, where I presented to the IAHS Task Force and bloggers a first summary of the ideas collected so far from the international IAHS Community. The ideas were further developed during a productive workshop of the IAHS Task Force held in Nanjing (China) during May 11-13, 2012, which was attended by IAHS Officers, Task Force members and local scientists.
The progress towards the Science Plan is synthetically presented in this blog page that will be updated continuously to collect your input. The presentation is deliberately schematic in order to keep it short and easy to read. Please see below for specific questions that I would like to be addressed by your comments.

Structure of the Science Plan (the list is not final)

  1. Title, acronym, logo.
  2. Premise, motivations and rationale.
  3. Definitions.
  4. Subject of the Science Plan and keywords.
  5. Targets.
  6. Science questions.
  7. Description of enabling research.
  8. Organisational structure.
  9. Milestones.

For the title, acronym and logo a dedicated blog page will be shortly created. Please refer to the top menu. The main priority is to define the subject, targets and science questions.

Subject
The general subject is research activity in relation to changing hydrology for a changing society and environment (please note: this is not the proposed title, but Eraclitusrather the main focus). Attention will be concentrated on understanding and modeling the two-way interactions between hydrological systems and society, which presupposes the study of how the hydrological systems themselves react to human-induced and natural changes.

The research activity will concentrate on fundamental as well as applied hydrology through prediction, uncertainty assessment, policy development and implementation.

Keywords
Understanding, Change, Society, Hydrological Prediction, Uncertainty, Risk, Vulnerability (to be completed)

Targets of the research activity
During the meeting in Nanjing three targets were identified.

Target 1 – Understanding
Improve the knowledge and understanding of hydrological systems, and in particular variability, indeterminacy (to be defined – it is one of the reasons for the presence of uncertainty), impacts of change, interaction with human activity. Special attention will be dedicated to complex systems like mountain areas (glaciers), urban areas, alluvial fans, deltas (list to be expanded).

Target 2: Estimation and prediction
Estimate and predict the behaviours and patterns of hydrological systems, with uncertainty assessment to support risk evaluation. This target includes estimation of design variables under change.

Target 3: Science in practice
Address societal needs, policy making and implementation.

Each target must be referred to by science questions.

Science questions
Subquestions can be developed to make the science plan inclusive and comprehensive. For each question, we will have to identify the enabling research later on.

Science question 1 (referred to Target 1)
How to understand the behaviours of changing hydrological systems?

  • How can patterns observation help us? How can co-evolution be modelled?
  • How can we effectively bring together theoretical hydrology, experimental hydrology, applied hydrology, and new measurement techniques to advance our knowledge of hydrological processes?
  • How can the typical time scales of change be identified? How can we constrain change?
  • How can we better understand hydrological behavior across different spatial scales?

Science question 2 (referred to Target 2)
How to integrate advanced knowledge with indeterminacy modelling and uncertainty assessment for improving prediction?

  • How to combine prediction and uncertainty assessment in a coherent framework that features uncertainty as an intrinsic attribute of hydrology and not a limitation? (Need for a real paradigm shift here).
  • How to use co-evolution and self-organisation laws to improve prediction?

Science question 3 (referred to Target 3)
How can we produce sound and transparent scientific modeling tools (open source)?

  • How to develop estimation/prediction methods that are based on good scientific understanding but are also practical to apply on a routine basis by water resources engineers? How can we improve the packaging and dissemination of our knowledge?
  • What are the critical requirements for an agreed protocol/standards for performance assessment and hypothesis/model testing?
  • How can we effectively communicate uncertainty and risk to water resources managers?

Science question 4 (cross-cutting targets)
How can we make use of new observations and information technologies in a new generation of models?

  • How to develop a vision to anticipate and maximise the monitoring technologies that will become available in a few years for the benefit of hydrology?
  • How to make use of new information and communication technologies for scientific cooperation and sharing of multi-basin models, data, and codes?
  • How to effectively combine the observations of the past with new observations based on new technology?

Science question 5 (cross-cutting targets)
How to model hydrology at the interfaces (e.g. surface/ground water interactions) and complex systems?

Comments from the community
We strongly seek your comments addressing the questions below (and others if you wish).

  1. Do you think the main focus is clear?
  2. Do you feel involved in the above Science Questions? Do you think you can actively contribute to this science initiative?
  3. Is the programme stimulating?
  4. Do you have any more Science Questions to suggest? Please note theConfucius breadth and generality of the above questions which should be coherent across all of them.
  5. Do you have suggestions for additional keywords?
  6. Do you have any other comments or concerns?

Please comment! Your input is needed for preparing the Science Plan. Comments should be posted by the end of August, 2012, in order to be taken into consideration when preparing the draft Science Plan to be presented in Delft (October 2012, please see here).

Alberto Montanari

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21 Responses to Towards the preliminary Science Plan

  1. Alberto Montanari says:

    Dear Bloggers,
    to complete the information related to the meeting in Nanjing, I am pleased to make available the presentation that was given by the IAHS President, Prof. Gordon Young, which can be downloaded here. It is an interesting perspective on the current major challenges related to water resources management.
    Furthermore, please find here a pdf copy of the presentation given by the Secretary General of the IAHS, Prof. Christophe Cudennec. It’s a vision on the structure of the next IAHS Decade, and therefore it is a valuable input for future discussions regarding the organisation of the research activity.
    Finally, please find here a pdf copy of the presentation given by Prof. Fuqiang Tian to summarise the input from the ICCLAS Commission, and here a pdf copy of the presentation given by Prof. Xinbao Zhang and Vladimir Belyaev to summarise the input from the ICCE Commission.
    Thank you for your attention.
    All the best,
    Alberto

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  2. Veena Srinivasan says:

    Thank you. Including anthropogenic feedbacks in study of water resource systems is a much needed step in the right direction and I would like to congratulate IAHS for taking this bold step. I think the proposed focus is relevant, timely and interesting.

    If this is to feed into policy discussions eventually I think some more keywords could be used: coupled human-water systems, freshwater security, water sustainability, co-evolution

    Additionally, I have two suggestions:
    1. Involve social scientists early on
    I understand IAHS’ focus is on hydrology, but these goals cannot be achieved without some engagement with social scientists. Modeling hydrology across the human-natural interface is likely to be much harder than the groundwater-surface water interface. Working with plant physiologists in extending hydrology to eco-hydrology, who share a similar training in natural sciences with hydrologists, is much easier than working across multiple social science disciplines in extending hydrology to “socio-hydrology”.
    Collaborations between hydrologists and social scientists who have fundamentally different training and epistemology is a non-trivial problem and won’t happen organically without targeted funding to overcome the barriers.

    2. Address the problem of diversity early on:
    Human systems are far more diverse than natural systems. Once socioeconomic and institutional diversity is coupled with hydrologic diversity, the problem quickly reduces to “every coupled system is unique” and finding patterns becomes intractable.
    Designing programs to specifically target this within the sub-categories – urban systems, mountainous regions, agro-pastoral systems etc. would be much appreciated Some ways to achieve this may be by funding multiple similar sites along a gradient, or funding consortia of scientists.

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  3. Salvatore Grimaldi says:

    Let us take a break …let us “come back” to observe hydrological processes!

    Following the very pleasant task force meeting kindly organized by the IAHS Vice President Liliang Ren at Hahoi University, Najing, China, I am always more in favor to support and stimulate the use of new observations, and observation in general, inside the new IAHS Decade Initiative.

    My feeling is that during the next decade the community should “come back” to observe hydrological processes taking the advantage of new technologies.

    I say “come back” since reading the literature and attending popular hydrological conferences my feeling is that, nowadays, most of researchers are devoting their time to model processes instead to observe it. Most of the times, the proposed models are really similar to each others, showing differences just for few details or parameters to better adapt it to local or specific conditions.

    I say “came back” since the fathers of hydrology proposed new theories or general models looking at the processes using very limited technologies and poor instrumentations.
    Recently, it is tangible the enormous progress in new technologies that helped and surely could help in the near future the community.

    I am not going to repeat my previous comment posted in the blog, but I feel that in ten years we should be prepared and prepare the professional community and Institutions to use the new generation of information that very fast, every days, are always more available.

    So, other to further emphasize this my point of view, my practical suggestion is to include also in the keywords the word “observations” and to identify a cross-target that would crystallize the importance of use of new observations, and observations in general, as a common basis of the three proposed targets.

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  4. Murugesu Sivapalan says:

    Thank you, Alberto, for the report from the Hohai (Nanjing) meeting. I found several positive, exciting aspects in your report.

    Firstly, after several months and rounds of discussions in the blog and in meetings, which explored a lot of lot of issues and ideas, the new initiative is beginning to take shape. The invoking of the ideas of Heraclitus is a clear confirmation that the community has reached a consensus that the new initiative is going to be centered on “change”, but change in a positive way. In the words of Heraclitus, “nothing is permanent except change”. The decision to focus on change should help with the next stage of the discussion.

    Secondly, I was very happy to see three themes emerging from the discussions in Nanjing, although they were presented in Alberto’s blog as targets. These were: “understanding”, “prediction” and “management” (these are my words, summarizing Alberto’s words). Understanding refers to fundamental research, prediction refers to (improved) methods deriving from the understanding, and management refers to the application of the methods to manage water resources for the benefit of society. This is a very balanced approach, but I would only add that these three themes are inter-connected, and that the management system itself is worthy of observation and analysis to develop new understanding of human-water interactions in the sense of socio-hydrology.

    I was relieved that prediction again takes an important part in the new initiative, just as it did in the PUB initiative (along with understanding). The new features of the initiative are therefore (i) “change” (in terms of an explicit time arrow, via co-evolution), (ii) “human-nature interactions” (via human impacts on the environment, and their feedbacks, and the management of these interactions and feedbacks).

    Another advance is a new and renewed focus on uncertainty in a broader way. I really liked the focus on indeterminacy-predictability-uncertainty in the context of changing systems, in particular in the context of human-nature systems. This can and should play a central role in the new initiative, and opens the way for a wide variety of approaches based on nonlinear dynamics and stochastic processes to enrich the field. Application of such techniques also provides new and productive avenues to understand how the coupled hydrologic-ecologic-social systems work.

    Finally, by focusing on “water” (not surface hydrology, or groundwater hydrology, not even hydrology), you have made a major break from PUB in terms of inclusivity of the wider community of water scientists. This is fantastic from the IAHS (the various commissions) perspective, but also from a societal perspective, and is going to be good to gain support and acceptance.

    I am also excited that the major advance in the thinking happened in Nanjing, which is going to be great for inclusivity at the international level. You have captured the spirit of this by invoking Heraclitus and Confucius in the same breath in the same report. Invoking of such wisdom from the ages is a good omen for the success of the initiative. I hope you can borrow some ideas from other sages from the past, such as Chief Seattle in the United States (of the “Web of Life” fame), and others.

    I believe, now that the broad themes are decided, the community can get around to refining the tentative science questions discussed in Nanjing, and mapping them onto actionable tasks or research activities that are done in a collaborative way across the world. The definitions of the activities will enable to arrive at some realistic goals in 10 years. In this sense there is a still a lot of work to do, but at this stage in the PUB project I believe we still much further behind (in fact the PUB Science Plan was completed some 6 months after its launch in December 2002).

    My only critical comments are:
    1. This new initiative is going to be highly interdisciplinary, including disciplines that are not even represented within the IAHS (for example, social sciences must be represented in an inclusive way from the beginning), along with ecologists.
    2. I think the time arrow needs to even more prominent in the thinking than it appears in the Nanjing report. I think the key words are there in the various science questions, such as co-evolution, but they must remain strong key words in the further development of the science plan. In this sense, comparative hydrology (which is already prominent in PUB but in a spatial context), must include time or history explicitly.

    I had a good feeling reading your report – I am convinced that this is going to lead to an exciting and successful new initiative, and once again IAHS, in spite of limited resources, has managed to provide science leadership at the international level, coming on the heels of the PUB initiative which is coming to an end. I look forward to following the continued progress of the science plan, and contributing to it from time to time.

    Siva Sivapalan

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  5. Bettina Schaefli says:

    Dear All

    I would like to comment on the targets and the keywords. First of all the key words: The current draft does not contain the keyword “ecology” nor the keyword “biology”, they are somewhat hidden in the word “co-evolution” (of what?). The “Bio”- component of the water cycle is what distinghuishes our field of research from e.g. meteorology, and it is the crucial link between water and society (the biota controls the quality and quantity of available water and vice versa). It thus needs to play a more prominent role in the science plan from my point of view.

    Second, the targets: they currently are Understanding, Estimation and Prediction and Science in practice (were Siva, in his own words, calls this last theme “management”). Could the theme “Science in practice” by re-named to “knowledge transfer”, to make sure that it includes also communication to the wider public and not just policy makers / managers ? “Knowledge transfer” is from my point of view more explicit than “science in practice”; in any case, communication to non-specialists should not be omitted. Similarly, Science Question 3 (referring to this target) should perhaps be more general asking the question of how we can transfer knowledge to engineers, policy makers, managers, other stakeholders including non-specialists.

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  6. Sally Thompson says:

    The structure of the plan – with the 3 areas of emphasis as understanding; estimation and prediction; and “science in practice” resonates strongly with some ideas that came up during an earlier discussion around the future of hydrology. The focus at the time was on whether there are ways to bridge the gap between science-driven “hydrology” and the more engineering and economics-driven disciplines encompassed by “water resources engineering”. I would like to share a conceptual figure that emerged from this discussion, which is almost like an “adaptive management” framework for water science broadly.



    The figure illustrates 3 areas of effort: discovery driven science (which maps to the understanding target); improving predictability (mapping to the estimation and prediction targets); and implementing management options (which maps to the science in practice target).

    The point of the figure, however, is to highlight that these 3 areas can and should provide a holistic platform for moving the discipline forward. For example, every time a management solution is implemented it creates an opportunity for discovery-based research — there are many opportunities to learn about the fundamentals of hydrological systems by studying their response to imposed changes in management (whether that be restoration efforts, policy changes, economic incentives, legal change, etc). Predictions made about the system response to the management initiative can be tested, creating opportunities to refine prediction techniques. And improvements in both understanding and prediction, if brought to bear on water management problems, ultimately should lead to improved decision making and outcomes.

    With this background, I am a little concerned with the suggestion of replacing “science in practice” with “knowledge transfer”. I think the boundary conditions on the community that this report wishes to speak to should be drawn a little more broadly. I would like to see the general public, agencies and decision-makers — stakeholders in the water sector broadly — being considered as cooperative partners in advancing water science. I am worried that “knowledge transfer” risks drawing a line between people who make knowledge and people who use knowledge — and I think the users of knowledge have a lot to contribute back to researchers and engineers — and it would be nice to think about making those contributions explicit in this vision.

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  7. Sylvain Coutu says:

    Dear all,
    Even though I am only a new member of the hydrology community, please let allow myself some brief comments:

    1) The main research focus is “research activity in relation to changing hydrology for a changing society and environment“. The first idea that comes to me when one evokes the word “change” is “climate change”. However, there is no mention to climate change neither in the proposal, nor in the comments and I find this surprising. I understand this topic has already benefited from significant research work but yet, many of the socio-economic and environmental change that you discussed may be related to climate change.

    2) I would like to emphasize the need of development in urban hydrology. In urban hydrology I include rainfall/run-off modeling in urban streams and pipe network, as well as the water quality processes associated. Impervious areas are constantly and rapidly increasing as more people seek to leave in larger cities. However, I realize that contributions of the scientific community remain very limited in this domain respect to rural hydrology, and that these contributions are often underestimated. I think the word urbanization (or any similar proxy) should be included in the keywords. Also, some sub-questions mentioning explicitly urban systems should be included for all three target points.

    All the best,
    Sylvain.

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  8. Rolf Hut says:

    In his article “The Growth of Astrophysical Understanding” Martin Harwit argues that “Progress comes primarily from the introduction of new observational and theoretical tools” (http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.1634532). He states that new insights are only obtained when new (sorts of) observations are introduced. In my opinion, this not only holds for Astro-physics, but for all branches of science, including hydrology. For example: the insights gained in the PUB initiative were partly made possible because remotely sensed data become “of age” and widely available.

    As the PUB decade comes to a close, we see that the hydrological sciences have focussed very strongly on modeling the last few years. We are, in my opinion, on the edge of what we can learn from (the current generation of) models: an even better way of estimating our parameters may reduce the uncertainty in our forecasts, but it will not lead to new insights in the fundamental functioning of the hydrological world / cycle / processes. Don’t get me wrong: we need our models and our modellers. Hydrological models, whether conceptual or distributed, physical based or black box, are our hypotheses! Our models represent how we think (believe) the hydrological world works. The fact that we care about overparameterization is to me a signal that we have extracted every bit of information from our current observations that we can. The next big breakthrough in hydrological understanding will be due to new observations and theoretical tools.

    And those observations & tools are coming (whether we want it or not). New methods to measure existing variables are emerging: Distributed Temperature sensing using fibre optic cables has been successfully introduced in hydrology the last couple of years. More methods are sure to follow. New computing tools are becoming available: cloudcomputing services give desktop hydrologist the power of a super-computer. Hydrological models need no longer be constrained by the computation power availablee, but will be constrained by the richness of the data it can build on. Innovations outside the classical hydrological field will also be a source of observations to us. Among them are:
    - The Internet of Things. Slowly everything is connected to the web. And since a lot of devices have sensors in them, this means that more and more data-feeds will turn op online. Think about the temp, humidty and wind sensors in air-conditioning units, but also the complete sensor platform that is the modern mobile phone. Sites like pachube.com already offer services to host this kind of sensor-data.
    - Social Media. I personally have tweeted on multiple occasions about the deplorable state of Dutch weather. A simple query can retrieve that tweet from the twitter databases, including it’s geolocation. I have become a walking “bad-weather-sensor”. Social media is a potential gold mine of data for hydrologists.
    In 10 years time, my son will not be using Twitter (for sure…), but he will be uploading his thoughts on local weather to some database on some server. I hope that in 10 years time, that piece of information is used in the weather forecast for the next day.

    If we want to measure & understand changes, we will have to use new, richer datasets. If we want to understand the link between society and “the water-world”, we must broaden our scope to also include societal data into our world. Socio-Economic data, data on human behaviour (in cases of emergencies / floods for example) will have to be included in the hydrologists “bag of tools”. Understanding, for example, the hydrology of the Central-California-Valley is impossible without understanding the political and socio-economic forces that influence it.

    I strongly feel that in the next hydrological decade a focus should be on data. For me, one of the most important lessons of the PUB decade is the immense value of having data. I mean data in the broadest sense of the word: remotely sensed as well as measured on the ground. Data gathered with both ancient, existing as well as new to be developed devices. Data from unconventional sources such as twitter or the AC unit in an office building. Off course, as Hillary pointed out, the success of PUB is partly due to the inclusive nature of the initiative. The topic for the next hydrological decade should be as inclusive as PUB was, without losing it’s focus. Focussing on data does not mean stopping modelling, far from it. Hydrological modellers should take up the challenge to use their models not only to make future predictions, but also to calculate what new measurements would have the biggest impact on reducing uncertainty in predictions.

    I therefore would like to suggest to add a “target zero”: observe. This will make sure
    that the classic “scientific workflow” of : Observe -> Understand -> estimate & predict -> communicate with society
    is fully represented in the new hydrological decade.

    Rolf Hut

    PS off course, “target zero” can very well be combined with target 1 into “Observe & Understand”

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  9. Hydrologic extremes had been increasing in recent years. For example, the number of major floods has been increasing world wide in recent years. Between 1950 and 1959, the number of major floods that had occurred was 10, 8, and 48 in Europe, Americas, and Asia respectively. By 1990-1999, the number of major floods that had occurred in these three continents were 105, 195 and 325, respectively. However, the potential hydrologic and climatic effects of global warming will be quite diverse and location specific. The extreme climate may have serious impacts on society, e.g. an increased occurrence of flooding events in some places but severe droughts in others. To investigate impact of climate change in different regions of the world, there is an urgent need to analyse, quantify and predict the components of the current and future global water cycles and related water resources states through a combination of , GCMs, RCMs, land surface schemes, and water resources management models. There is also a need to evaluate uncertainties associated with projecting our climate and water resources to the distant future, and to assess the overall vulnerability of global water resources related to the main societal and economic sectors.

    In summary, there is an urgent need to develop a modelling and data framework to assess the future vulnerability of global water supply as a resource.

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  10. Ian Littlewood says:

    There is much to agree (and disagree) with in this very interesting series of blog postings. So, it is definitely doing the job intended. My comments have been triggered by a small selection of specific points raised by a few others, concentrating on items where I agree with previous commentators and might have something to add.

    I agree with Robin Clarke’s reasoning – the new IAHS Decade should be mainly about hydrological science. The new Decade should seek to serve the interests of, and continue to make progress in, scientific hydrology. It should therefore be designed and proceed appropriately with respect to its links with other disciplines.

    Alberto has wisely said that choice of the title for the new Decade should be left for a while. However, I would like to offer a personal view concerning what it should not include. Yes, uncertainty should be a keyword for the new Decade (one of Alberto’s bullets) but I think the word “uncertainty” (or similar) should not be in its title. My view is that to include it there, if anyone is still thinking along these lines, would be unwise – because of its negative connotations to the layperson. There should be nothing negative in the title. Yes, reducing uncertainty in outputs from our hydrological science, and conveying uncertainty aspects of our science to users, e.g. engineers, politicians, etc, should continue (following on from PUB) to be explicit overarching themes for the new Decade but in the interests of being upbeat for presentational purposes let’s not emphasise uncertainty in the title.

    Elena Toth’s comments that “a fundamental contribution must come from the full exploitation of the available data” through the application of “data-driven” models are sensible. One output from participants of PUB Working Group 1 (top-down modelling) during the Decade now drawing to a close has been research applications of grey box (not black) data-driven rainfall–streamflow (R-S) modelling, e.g. pointing towards how uncertainty in regionalised R-S model parameters might be reduced in practice. IHACRES and data-based mechanistic (DBM) data-driven modelling highlight the distinction, which can become important when temporally coarse data are used for calibrating a discrete-time model for a flashy catchment, between fitting a model to data (curve-fitting – or getting the right answer for the wrong reasons) and fitting a model to a catchment (getting closer to the right answer for the right reasons). For a flashy catchment, even if an IHACRES model parameter is calibrated with good precision using daily data it can be massively inaccurate (and therefore very uncertain). Much recent research has been undertaken without paying enough attention to the fact that, for discrete-time conceptual R-S models, only those calibrated using sufficiently high-frequency data for a given catchment stand a chance of yielding precise and accurate (don’t forget – both are required for low uncertainty) model parameters. In the context of discrete-time conceptual R-S modelling this has implications (a) when regionalising the parameters of any such model using national datasets for gauged catchments and (b) whenever such models are used to assist with gaining a better understanding (especially quantitatively) of catchment-scale processes. Relevant textbooks and research literature (until very recently) largely ignore these fundamental points. I think this area of research should be further stimulated by the next Decade and, in this sense, would suggest it might be considered together with the points raised by Charles Perrin.

    Ian Littlewood

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  11. David Garen says:

    With a theme of “changing hydrology for a changing society and environment”, a key question is whether these needs are best met by more scientific knowledge and technological capabilities or whether they are instead primarily ethical at the core. I often feel that many of the most pressing needs of society and the environment now are related more to values and ethics than to technical information (or the lack thereof).

    Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) already has some concepts that relate to this, and organizations such as UNESCO have programs and reports addressing many of these issues. I think it would be good if these ideas, and some extensions, were explicitly linked to and embraced by IAHS in its new science initiative.

    So, I would propose a Science Question 6, which could be considered to connect with Target 3 (“Science in practice”) or be a cross-cutting question. I would label this “water ethics” (which is an emerging sub-field of environmental ethics), and it would address questions such as:

    * Can we broaden our philosophical basis so that we recognize whether the needs of society and the environment are primarily scientific / technological issues (e.g., need more observations or better models) or values / ethical issues (i.e., already have sufficient technical information, just need to make appropriate choices based on ethical principles)?
    * How would this recognition direct hydrologists in setting goals and priorities for their work?
    * If predictions of hydrologic impacts are highly uncertain, and if there is “irreducible uncertainty” in predictions, is it even feasible to use benefit-cost analysis as a decision paradigm? What other decision paradigms can be used? For example, would the “precautionary principle” or “small water footprint” be useful (and non-economic) alternative paradigms / ethics for water resources development and management?
    * In the face of predictive uncertainty, what principle or ethic should guide us in allocating the risk to the different and competing interests for water?
    * Should major interventions into the hydrologic system with a “large footprint” be automatically excluded from consideration based on a new ethic?
    * Should water and the catchment be viewed purely as a resource to manage for meeting human needs, or should humans see themselves as an integral part of the environment and that the environment has its own intrinsic value independent of human needs?
    * Are the current principles of IWRM sufficient to achieve the dual goals of meeting human needs while also preserving the environment, or is IWRM still too anthropocentric in its outlook?

    I could go on and elaborate on these points further, but hopefully my main idea is clear. While these questions are not really “hard science”, I think they are pertinent to ensuring that hydrology and water resources management remain relevant to addressing real-world problems.

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  12. Demetris says:

    If I wanted to be critical, the topic I would choose to criticize would be the No. 1 Target, i.e. “understanding”. But I refrain from negative comment, being satisfied by Alberto’s subsequent clarification, that is, “Improve[ment of] knowledge”, which IMHO makes much more sense than “understanding”.

    On the positive side, I wish to mention two things that positively impressed me. The first I saw in the President’s presentation and is related to the broad view of hydrology he promotes. It has been very common to see phrases like “hydrology as a geophysical/earth science” but Gordon reminds us that the IAHS objective is to “promote the study of Hydrology as an aspect of earth sciences and of water resources”. Also, I applaud his choice to “approach the subject from the perspective of human needs”. This is also evident in Alberto’s text—mostly in Target 3, “Science in practice”.

    The second thing that made me happy is Alberto’s choice to invoke Heraclitus for the science plan and to highlight two of his famous quotations. Siva also commented on Heraclitus, repeating one of the quotations.

    I felt it proper to add with this comment a third, so far missing yet very relevant, quotation from Heraclitus*, “Πάντα ῥεῖ” or “everything flows”. I cannot imagine an aphorism shorter than these two words, magically put together. As it identifies “flow” with “change”, I think it is most relevant for the science plan, as it shapes up, and could serve as a logo for the new decade. I believe even its original Greek form written in Latin alphabet, i.e. “Panta rhei”, is understandable even by the layperson (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heraclitus#Panta_rhei ).

    All the best,

    Demetris

    *In fact, Heraclitus’ writings have survived in fragments quoted or related by other authors; in particular, “Panta rhei” appears in Plato’s Cratylus, sections 339-340.

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  13. Vladimir Smakhtin says:

    I really enjoyed browsing through correspondence related to the Plan for the next decade, and thought of dropping my two pence worth. I would like to strongly support the point made by Salvatore Grimaldi, which also echoed in some other postings (but still I am not sure that it is getting the required attention). Let’s take a break from endlessly trying to improve models with the very limited observed data, and focus the next decade more on improved observed data availability. The problem of observations – at different scales, for various hydrological processes – if not resolved, will always be a limiting factor in our ability to understand hydrological systems. We all know this. Almost every paper published in hydrology water resources explicitly or implicitly blames the lack of data. The first Hydrological Decade from mid 1960s focused on Data (off my head, correct me if I am wrong), and good progress was achieved. But latter it got diffused, and it is not a surprise that situation globally only deteriorated, particularly in the last two decades. We are still guessing, not assessing water resources, as John Rodda once (in 1995) put it. There is no doubt in my mind that last PUB decade produced a lot of super tool for prediction in ungagged basins. But shouldn’t we be also trying to solve the problem of actually reducing the numbers of such basins?
    Some think it is not a scientific but rather political / funding problem. It is partially true, but research showing economic value of water data, improved design of monitoring networks to capture increasing variability etc. (i.e. changing world) can / should influence politics and funding. There is a great need to continue improving ground observational networks. But alternative research focus shall be on remote data acquisition techniques. There is plenty of room for improvement in those, no doubt, but there is good progress also. I hear the counter-argument that we will never be able to measure fluxes, storages and flows by remote techniques as reliably as by ground based methods. Well, future will show. But dismissing the potential of remote methods of becoming an alternative to ground-based ones, because remote ones have issues today, sound like a dead end. Funny enough, we are so much in our “box” sometimes that we forget that, for example, long-term discharge series at a flow gauge are not, strictly speaking, measured. They are calculated from a rating curve that comes from only a few concurrent stage and discharge measurements. So it is another model, and yet, we treat these data as “observed“.
    Hydrology and Change is a good focus, don’t take me wrong. All research questions that are formulated are pertinent and relevant. But it would be good to emphasize the observed data aspect, as much as possible and re-direct much more effort of global hydrological community, in this changing world, of course, to the solution of the acute data problem, rather than dissolving it.
    One more concern comes to mind – a different one: the issue of communicating PUB science. I think this is another major bottleneck in hydrology at present. How much of fine PUB tool and ideas have actually become known, let alone implemented, in developing world, where most of water problems are? I see a lot of individuals and groups modeling and remodeling the same basins again and again with, very often, just the same one or two common models, without paying much attention to recent scientific developments.
    And finally, it would be good to think of some measurable, scientifically and socially relevant targets for the next decade, something like MDGs in hydrology and water resources. Every really good plan needs some.

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  14. Alberto Montanari says:

    Dear Bloggers, I am posting a comment on behalf of Andreas Schumann (Ruhr University Bochum and IAHS-ICWRS Commission Officers.
    With my best regards,
    Alberto

    The hydrosphere affects human societies as human societies affect the hydrosphere. If the spatial and temporal distribution of water does not fit human requirements, we take corrective actions, mostly based on engineering works. Many of these interventions have no holistic view, are not multifunctional or sustainable. Often we adopt them only to certain temporal and spatial scales. As we intervene in hydrological cycles the outcomes of these changes will result in further needs to adapt the hydrosphere in larger scales and so on. A solution which seems to be useful in one scale could often cause new problems in other scales. That is why a deeper knowledge of feedback mechanisms and a more holistic view on human interventions into hydrological processes at all scales and their interlinks seems to be essential.
    I hope this idea would be useful for further discussions.

    Andreas Schumann (Ruhr University Bochum)

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  15. Dear reader,

    Although this post is not strictly related to the main subject of the current post, we got prof. Montanari’s approval to share a message on this blog:

    We would like to introduce you to an initiative to set up a network for young (aspiring) scientists in the field of hydrology. The latter is initiated by two M.Sc students that realized that there might be a lot of potential in increasing the involvement of young scientists by means of setting up a network. Examples of benefits could be:

    - Stimulate bottom-up research initiatives, initiated by Ph.D/M.Sc peers,
    - Improve research opportunities and collaboration by creating an easy accessible network,
    - Stimulate awareness among young scientists about current and future research topics.

    For this reason we have decided to explore the possibility to start up a network, the EGU-HS Young Hydrologist Society. The first meeting of the initiative is planned during the EGU General Assembly 2013 in Vienna. This meeting will be an interactive session where we want to discuss the possible contribution of this network, what its goals should be and how this should be organized in the most effective fashion. During the coming months we would like to gather a team of students and/or young scientists to further shape the initiative.

    We would like to ask for your help by spreading this message to your students. Any graduate or postgraduate student interested in joining thus initiative is cordially invited to contact us.

    More information on the initiative and the session at the EGU 2013 General Assembly can be found on http://www.younghs.com or requested by sending an email to younghydrologicsociety@mail.com. Any feedback by replying to this post or sending an email is highly appreciated.

    Wouter Berghuijs & Tim van Emmerik
    M.Sc. students Delft University of Technology

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  16. Charles Perrin says:

    One aspect that should not be omitted in the Science Plan is the development of improved methodologies to evaluate how well our models work to predict change. Current testing approaches are often not demanding enough to reveal the actual weakness of models and the evaluation of model performance is often indulgent. We need more objective procedures to benchmark models and get objective ways of qualifying model accuracy. This means also that we need improved criteria to better highlight models’ quality needed to predict changes (see e.g. the recent works by H. Gupta’s group, J. Ewen or U. Ehret and E. Zehe). The use of reference data sets may also be helpful.
    This should help improving models and make end-users more confident in their model selection.

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  17. Semu Moges says:

    the Targets coined in the plan – understanding, estimation/prediction and addressing societal impacts requires one to think to see more elaboration but we are discussing on it. Few comments I have today are on data and past infrastructures and hydrology. As a hydrologist working with stations in developing world, I have had the chance to access data from different sources, vistsed many stations. We have witnessed the location of measurement are changed, different precision measuring equipments installed or used along the years, the rating curve data are not updates, the location of the channel morphology is unstable, etc. However, we don’t see the change points on the metadat regarding location, morphology, equipment change, etc…we collect whatever data we get from agencies we put it on our model and take several days/weeks of our time in fitting and forcing the data to a model. There are instances where we have quite different set of data for the same stations accessed from different agencies. Consdequently it is likely broader or wider changes are obsecured and not visible in stations of similar geogrphical location. We have seen adjacent stations showing different signals during regional drought phenomenon. the challenges of ground data base remians a challenge for validation of remote sensed data, data assimilating and improving technologies. Therefore, focusing on spatial data reconstruction and modelling may be one areas we can focus, while reinforcing expermental monitoring stations and measurement capability. I would like to emphasis the point raised by Vladimir Smakhtin on the data issue shall be revisited in the coming decade. Secondly, we have several thousands of hydraulic structures all over the world designed and operated based on our classical knowledge of hydrology (assumed stationarity). Couldn’t we focus as part of sociatal challenge to address how do we incorporate our understanding of the changing hydrology in sustaining our hydraulic infsrastructures. ‘How do we improve the safety and sustianbility of existing hydraulic structures under future changed hydrology?

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  18. Uwe Ehret says:

    Dear Alberto Montanari and the organizers of the new IAHS decade,

    Coming back from the great PUB meeting in Delft, I would like to add a comment I could not make in the pop-up presentations due to time constraints:

    When I look from a hydrologists perspective to the atmospheric sciences, I am a bit jealous due to several reasons:
    - first, with the WMO they have an organization which actually sets world-wide standards for the way data are collected,
    - second, they run world-wide coordinated measurements and have these data operationally available for forecasting,
    - third, they have a relatively small number of models which are used and further developed by many institutions.

    Why are the meteorologists in this repsect considerably further than we are? I think out of sheer necessity: Weather modeling & forecasting can only be achieved on global scale, while hydrology’s blessing and curse is that catchments exist which allow to a certain degree isolated considerations. This got us pretty far with simple models, largely neglecting many crucial feedback mechanisms. However, for predictions under change and taking into account the many facets of water (ecological, human, etc.) this is no longer possible.

    What I suggest as central goals for hydrology in order to understand (and predict) hydrological change, we need
    - world-wide long-term observatories in which data relevant for all the disciplines related to hydrology are collected in a standardized way. This will help to overcome case-specificness and incomparability of individual studies
    - setting standards for the retrieval and central storage of data to facilitate data use
    - A joint hydrological model platform to which all hydrologists can contribute to step beyond the development of many similar models.

    All these tasks require long-term and international activities and the question is to which organization these could be attached to.

    I hope with this I can contribute to the formulation of the new IAHS science goals.

    Best regards,
    Uwe Ehret

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  19. Keith Beven says:

    Alberto,

    John Selker expressed my concerns about the current draft of the science plan very nicely in Delft. The need for a real drive on new measurement techniques is not listed in your key points and your SQ4 “How can we make use of new observation and information technologies in a new generation of models” is passive (“make use of”) not pro-active (“How can we initiate the development of new measurement techniques…..”). As I expressed before, this needs action along the lines of the design of a new satellite (with a similar decadal time scale) i.e. the critical questions: What is the functional requirement? What is technically possible? Who will fund it?

    If there is to be a new IAHS Working Group on Observational Methods then it needs to be an integral part of the new Science Plan. It is not too difficult to suggest areas where we need drastically improved measurement methods….. including discharge in an arbitrary channel to an accuracy where increments of discharge downstream would be meaningful, and total changes in storage at some useful scale.

    k

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  20. Alberto Montanari says:

    Dear Bloggers,

    I am back home after the meeting in Delft and I wish to thank all of you for the productive exchange of ideas that we had last week, which is still continuing. In fact, we got today the blog contributions of Keith Beven and Uwe Ehret (thanks to both of you!) and I am still receiving many comments via email. Indeed, the discussions we had during the sessions in Delft were extremely high quality.

    For your interest, the slides of the talk I gave in Delft can be downloaded here.

    Unfortunately I have now to rush back to my academic commitments for some days, but I promised to prepare finalise the draft of the Science Plan of the new decade by the mid of November, by taking into account all the inputs I am receiving. I will prepare a new blog post to share the draft document with the whole community. Then, the blog will still be open for comments until Dec 31st. This latter date will mark the closure of the job of the task force, that will be then dissolved accordingly to the initial plan.

    The Science and Implementation Plan will be finalised by me, in cooperation with the IAHS officers, during the first two months of 2013, to be ready to be approved by the IAHS Bureau in July 2013, when the new decade will be launched.

    For now, I am pleased to report that the IAHS Bureau has approved the name of the new initiative, namely, PANTA RHEI. It means “everything flows” (please see here. Therefore, it is an excellent synthesis of the new decade’s aims.

    As I anticipated above, I will upload a new post on the blog as soon as the next draft of the Science Plan is ready. Meanwhile, please do not hesitate to comment!

    All the best,
    Alberto

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  21. Alberto Montanari says:

    Dear Bloggers, I am posting a comment on behalf of Greg Characklis who is currently travelling.

    ****
    Alberto,
    Thanks for all of your efforts on this. I hope that it turns out to be an influential exercise.
    One thought that occurs to me is that the Hydrology community speaks very openly about trying to use its research to address the water-related challenges that society faces, but it is often difficult to see exactly how many projects are connected to societal problems.
    One thing that might be nice is to have a group think about a list of some of the biggest challenges and explicitly describe them in ways that would be recognizable to those outside of the Hydrology community. These would likely include issues like:
    - Ensuring reliable water supplies
    - Protection against floods
    - Maintenance of healthy ecosystems
    - etc.
    Then the list of research themes described in the Science Plan could be described (at least partly) in terms of the specific societal problem to which they are relevant.
    My observation has been that, in the past, very few people outside of the Hydrology community understand how the community’s research benefits society, and this might be a way of (1) helping those outside of Hydrology to understand the value of hydrologic research, and (2) ask the Hydrology community to take a moment to think about its research agenda within the context of the challenges that society faces.

    Greg Characklis

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