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