In its “Hallway Conversations” series, the Young Hydrologic Society has recently published an interview with Serena Ceola, who is a senior assistant professor at University of Bologna, Department of Civil, Chemical, Environmental, and Materials Engineering. The interview was conducted by Sina Khatami, a PhD student at the University of Melbourne. With their agreement, we reproduce the interview, w ...[Read More]
Hydrologists Join Youth-Led #GlobalClimateStrike
In a powerful sign of solidarity, adults from across an estimated 185 countries took to the streets to join last Friday’s youth-led Global Climate Strike, the largest climate protest in history. Among those in attendance were hydrologists from around the world, who stood shoulder to shoulder with young people to support their calls for immediate climate action. As a hydrologist who participa ...[Read More]
YHS interview Martyn P. Clark: “rainfall-runoff modelling, per se, is dead”
In its “Hallway Conversations” series, the Young Hydrologic Society has recently published an interview with Martyn P. Clark, who is currently professor and the Associate Director of Centre for Hydrology and Canmore Coldwater Lab, at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada. The interview was conducted by Sina Khatami, a PhD student at the University of Melbourne. With their agreement, we reproduce ...[Read More]
All models are wrong but…
Left: Les Grandes Baigneuses by Pierre-August Renoir (1884-1887) [Credit: Philadelphia Museum of Art]. Right: En la playa by Pablo Picasso (1937) [Credit: Guggenheim New York]. Bathers have been the subject of a lot of paintings. Interestingly, over time some of these portraits have become much simpler than their predecessors – though equally effective and successful.
“All models are wrong but some are useful” is a quote you probably have heard if you work in the field of computational hydrology – or ‘hydroinformatics’ – the science (or craft?) of building computer models of hydrological systems. The idea is that, even if these models cannot (by definition!) be a 1:1 representation of reality, their erroneous predictions can still be useful to support decision- ...[Read More]