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]
Hortonian overland flow: when theory becomes reality
Hortonian overland flow – if you have ever followed a hydrology class, you have certainly come across this jargon: this is the name of a hydrological process – when rainfall flows off at the terrain surface because the rainfall intensity is so high that not all the water can infiltrate into the soil (rainfall intensity is higher than infiltration capacity). Almost every hydrological 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]