Teaching the next generation of scientists, engineers, and planners hydrology may sometimes feel like a chore, but it might be the most impactful thing we do! So, I think it is always worth taking a look to see if we can optimize our approaches. What follows are some ideas that have shaped my teaching strategies over the last decade. I don’t pretend to be an authority on this stuff, but I’ve curat ...[Read More]
The Rising Need for Interdisciplinary Literacy The sustainable management of water resources requires cooperative institutions whose development are rarely included in already overloaded engineering and earth sciences curricula. The resilience of such institutions in the context of climatic and demographic change is also poorly understood. Enter “Thirsty Earth,” an online open-access m ...[Read More]
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]
What a hydrological year it has been! From the winter drought and flash floods detailed in Matano and Avanzi‘s blog post to the remarkably warm and wet November 2023, Europe has witnessed a range of extraordinary weather phenomena. In the Alpine region, the convergence of warm and wet weather resulted in numerous rain-on-snow events (see eg. the streamflow recording below), offering valuabl ...[Read More]
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]
Let me guess from which city in the world you are reading this post: Lima, Lahore or Louisville? It might be that you are modelling one of these rivers: Nile, Rhine or Lena? Or studying the Caribbean Sea, the Arabian Sea or the Caspian Sea? The country you live might be Uganda, Philippines or maybe Iceland and your home continent could well be Europe, Latin America or even Antarctica. I assume you ...[Read More]
Around a year ago, I all of a sudden had to find a quick solution to do online teaching. The timing was perfect: start of the semester, start of online teaching, video conference infrastructure unavailable, three kids at home and me, a hydrology teacher who has never produced any kind of video exceeding a 20s cell phone video. Being the kind of person who always has to find a solution, I produced ...[Read More]
The Coronavirus pandemic demands creativity and flexibility from all of us when we cannot meet in person any longer and need to switch to online meetings and events. Just recently, 120 upper secondary school students (15-18 years old) of four different countries around the Baltic Sea — Finland (incl. Åland), Sweden, Latvia, and Estonia — attended an online Boot Camp to kick start one of the greate ...[Read More]
Conducting field courses in times of a pandemic can be challenging. In our case, we had to cancel a planned field trip in economic geography that would have taken 19 students and two advisors to the Valle Maira in the Italian province of Cuneo in the Piemont. We had planned to spend 10 days in this region to develop ideas for sustainable development of peripheral mountain regions. Students would h ...[Read More]
Some people claim that teaching online courses or virtual workshops is not very different from face-to-face meetings. In my experience, however, it is much harder to sneak away secretly from a half-occupied seminar room than to withdraw from a virtual meeting where you simply mute the speaker to work on your emails located only one mouse click away. And that’s not all! In contrast to physically pr ...[Read More]