Between October 5 – 10, 2025, the XIIth Scientific Assembly of the International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS) took place in Roorkee, India.
Overall, more than 600 hydrologists assembled on the campus of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) to share their latest progress, discuss with their colleagues, nurture connections, and celebrate hydrology as a discipline.
Here’s a look back!
The Scientific Assembly of the IAHS at IIT Roorkee
With over 12 000 members from 150 countries, IAHS is the largest scientific organisation in the world dedicated to hydrology. It’s also one of the key sister organisations that EGU’s Hydrological Division collaborates with on a regular basis, to foster community, provide training, and highlight opportunities for Early Career Scientists (ECS).
The IAHS’ Scientific Assembly takes place every four years, with the last meeting in Montpellier, France. This time round, the IAHS community set out to Roorkee, a university town in the North of India, between the River Ganges and the foothills of the Himalayas.
Photo credit: Christina Orieschnig
Bracketed by two weekends of side-events – from working group meetings to science communication and AI workshops – hydrologists could benefit from five full days of scientific sessions.
Testing a New Conference Format
One of the stand-out points of IAHS2025 was a new conference format. Instead of having multiple disciplinary sessions in parallel – with conference attendants being able to choose which seminar room or lecture hall to go to based on their interests – there was only one session at a time, in the spacious convocation hall of IIT Roorkee.
Each session consisted of two or three full-length oral presentations (a 12-minute talk and 8 minutes of Q&A), followed by one-minute flash presentations. These flash presentations gave authors an opportunity to pitch their research subject and subsequent poster presentation to the entire community. Plus, people also had the opportunity to film a 3-minute video outlining their research, which was uploaded to the IAHS YouTube channel.
Photo credit: IAHS2025 image library, Mario Mendiondo, Taiga Suzuki, and Christina Oriesching.
From Early Career Scientists to Stockholm Prize Winners
Throughout the week, IAHS2025 highlighted the contributions of both ECS and senior researchers. The Early Career Scientists Committee of IAHS, in collaboration with the Indian chapter of the Young Hydrologic Society (YHS) organised several side events and skill-building workshops.
One of the highlights of the week was the lecture series held by winners of the Stockholm Water Prize, the equivalent of a Nobel prize for water. For the last three years, it has been awarded to senior hydrologists, all of whom have been active in IAHS.
Photo credit: IAHS2025 image library.
On Thursday morning, Günter Blöschl (Technische Universität Wien), Taikan Oki (University of Tokyo) and Andrea Rinaldo (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Università di Padova) gave laureate lectures outlining their decades-long contributions to fostering our understanding of floods, the global water cycle, and interactions between water and health.
They also gave valuable advice to ECS on how to thrive in academia, ranging on a wide spectrum from dedicating yourself to your work and building your name (“No article, no life!”) to also sitting back and taking the time to enjoy life (“Smell the roses!”).
Local Flavour: Excursions and Cultural Events
Apart from enriching disciplinary discussions, IAHS2025 also offered hydrologists opportunities to immerse themselves in local culture and experience the multifaceted cultural, hydrological, and geological highlights the region has to offer.
In addition to festive opening and closing ceremonies, and the regional dishes served at lunch breaks and a dance demonstration and cultural evening, there were several excursions. These led participants to the National Institute of Hydrology, the H. B. Medlicott Museum of Geology, as well as Rishikesh and Haridwar, two towns on the River Ganges with enormous spiritual significance that have become centers of pilgrimage, yoga, and meditation.
Photo credit: Christina Orieschnig
Building Community: From Yoga to Song
Finally, one of the most valuable parts of IAHS2025 for many attendees was the opportunity to fully immerse themselves in the global community of hydrologists.
As Prof. Blöschl had pointed out during his laureate lecture, research collaborations are most productive and enriching when you work with your friends – with people who are just as passionate about the same subjects as you. This conference was a fantastic way of finding these people and making these friends – especially for ECS.
Between chats during coffee breaks, lunchtime discussions, and organised community events such as the sports evening on Monday, it was easy to get to know colleagues whose names you knew and whose papers you’d read, on a personal level.
The culmination of this social side of the conference was the gala dinner on Wednesday evening, which ended in the traditional IAHS song contest, in which participants from different countries band together to share their musical traditions.
Photo credit: IAHS2025 image library and Christina Orieschnig
As the conference drew to a close and people headed to the airports or other destinations in India (for those lucky enough to stick around!) one thing was for sure – it had been a fantastic and productive meeting, and the next gathering of IAHS was too far off.
Most of us are already looking forward to seeing each other again at the General Assembly of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics (IUGG) – of which IAHS is a member organisation – in Incheon, South Korea, in July 2027.
