Pieces of history

History of Hydrology@EGU2025 and beyond

Keith Beven and Bettina Schaefli December 20, 2024

History of Hydrology: Robert Horton’s perceptions of preferential infiltration and air escape. From his unpublished monograph on Infiltration of Rainfall.

You are certainly aware of the continued efforts of a group of hydrologists, with the lead of Keith Beven, to shed light on the history of hydrology, including the History of Hydrology Wiki . Looking back to those who shaped our science, the questions they addressed and those that remain open is essential to understand the role of hydrology in earth system sciences, in the development of field res ...[Read More]

Historical evolution of water management: the example of Switzerland over 200 years

Jeanine Janz, Christian Binz and Manuel Fischer April 25, 2024

(source: © eawag)

How can we use and manage natural resources more sustainably? This question stands at the core of many social, political and scientific debates about how we can reach the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The targets are ambitious, and there is a growing consensus that rapid and extensive structural change is needed in various sectors simultaneously. However, how transformation ...[Read More]

Exploring the History of Hydrology – Join the Effort to Map Our Discipline Across the Centuries

Keith Beven August 2, 2023

The history of hydrology stretches back millennia: from the engineers of ancient high cultures over scientific pioneers like Da Vinci and Pallisy to modern groundbreaking modellers. However, so far, few hydrologists have worked to systematically record the history of their discipline – especially in its more recent decades. That is a gap that the History of Hydrology working group of the In ...[Read More]

Urban streams can provide water sources for climate change mitigation

Helene Mueller April 26, 2023

Methodical approach for the suitability pre-assessment for decoupling in-sewer captured streams to support urban blue-green climate adaptation measures within ProBACH. Picture: Prenner et al. (2022)

With advancing climate change, mitigation measures are necessary to fight urban heat islands. Reactivating urban streams as blue-green infrastructures can contribute to this mitigation, and serve as an invaluable water resource. Urban streams – banned to the underground In urban areas, hydrological conditions have been modified, impacted or completely changed for centuries. Rivers and stre ...[Read More]