Hydrological Sciences

Overlooked tips for the lost art of fieldwork

Natalie Ceperley February 29, 2024

The author finalizing installation of a meteorological station in the Vallon de Nant, just in the kink of time (before winter truly begins).

Not so long ago, almost all hydrologic data depended almost exclusively on fieldwork. Today, sure, you can download data from repositories, there are satellites that beam you magic numbers that you can interpret to give you almost any variable, and some (less than we might hope) long-term monitoring has been outsourced to governments (or in some cases to citizens with sensors). But somewhere in ...[Read More]

How far can we take the DORA rules?

Bettina Schaefli October 5, 2023

DORA stands for Declaration on Research Assessment, also known as the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment. The declaration was developed back in 2012 during the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology in San Francisco and has become a worldwide initiative since then. The country where you are currently reading this post has most probably signed the declaration (the cou ...[Read More]

Ma Terre en 180 Minutes: reducing our carbon footprint with concrete actions

Team "Ma Terre en 180 Minutes" August 31, 2023

As with all professional activities, one of the greatest challenges for us, geoscientists, is how to reduce our own CO2 emissions linked to our research activities over the coming decades. A collective of 57 researchers came together in 2021-2022 to promote awareness and concrete action to decarbonize scientific activities: it was the birth of Ma Terre en 180 Minutes, whose title is inspired by Ma ...[Read More]

How has ChatGPT changed the way you teach hydrology?

Bettina Schaefli June 14, 2023

Generated with beta.dreamstudio.ai, with the prompt: “a class of students in a lecture hall, sketch”, changed into black and white

Have you ever used ChatGPT to teach hydrology? If so, when did you start? I opened my account on openai.com in November 2022, out of curiosity, to test GPT-3 (Generative Pretrained Transformer generation 3). This was shortly before ChatGPT was launched (30 November 2022). Now, I even have a paid account to speed up the preparation of non-scientific texts, e.g. teaching materials on the use of Exce ...[Read More]