Hydrological Sciences

Thirsty Earth: a multiplayer online game for water resources education and research

Lauren E. McGiven and Marc F. Müller March 7, 2024

Image: Winter at Little Rann. Kutch, Dec’22, Credit: Kandukuru Nagarjun, License: CC BY 2.0 DEED License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en image url: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Parched_earth_(52554483693).jpg

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]

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]

May the year-end be Exceptional, not only hydrologically!

Bettina Schaefli December 21, 2023

Generated with DreamStudio, "beautiful rainy christmas in a river catchment"

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]

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]