Details of the Working Group
Hydrologic Design - Solutions & Communication: Lead by Svenja Fischer
Hydrologic design is one of the key tasks of hydrologists and most important for most stakeholders, authorities, and practitioners. Usually, the estimation of design characteristics like the design flood is based on statistical methods. This comes with a few drawbacks: limited data availability and thus high uncertainty and variability of the estimation, the lack of physical process-knowledge and the difficulty in communicating the methods and results in a way understandable and applicable by practitioners and community. This working group will develop novel methods to improve the estimation of uncertainty and variability in hydrological design and to be able to extrapolate the results to data scarce regions, ungauged catchments or beyond the observation range. The usage of available information from local sources will be improved, such that different sources of information are combined. This will allow for a simplified communication of hydrological design and the corresponding uncertainty to stakeholders, local people, and authorities, increase the dissemination of the methodology and hence strengthen the connection between science and practice.
View the proposal and sign up here and view the Presentation from the November 2023 webinar.
Sub-groups
At the EGU 2025 meeting and in our online survey, we have identified two major topics that are of interest for the members of our working group. To better align with these interests, we have formed to sub-groups:
- Floods (leaders: Eleonora Dallan, Abinesh Ganapathy, Ju-Young Shin)
- Droughts and water management (leaders: Cristina Prieto, Gökcen Uysal)
Activities
2026
Splinter meeting at EGU 2026 with an invited talk and discussions, details will follow soon
2025
EGU Splinter meeting, 30th April, 2025, Vienna, Austria:
2024
Group meeting at the ICWRS/ICSH conference 2024, November 2024, Florianopolis, Brazil
Webinar
We have started our webinar series in October 2025, where every three month we will have invited talks to either a topic related to the sub-groups on floods or on droughts and water management. You can re-watch all webinars on our YouTube channel: Hydrologic Design: Solutions and communication
Previous webinars:
Conrad Wasko (University of Sydney, Australia): Extreme rainfall changes and their incorporation in design flood estimation. (15.10.2025)
Upcoming webinars:
Fabrizio Fenicia (EAWAG, Switzerland): Advancing hydrological predictions: data, information extraction, and modelling insights. 14th January 2026, 15:00 - 16:00 CET (meeting link)
Publications
Fischer, S., Dallan, E., Fiori, A., Grimaldi, S., Kochanek, K., Prieto, C., … Volpi, E. (2025). Hydrological design in the HELPING decade – inspiring the community to innovate the hydrological design concept. Hydrological Sciences Journal, 70(3), 375–389. https://doi.org/10.1080/02626667.2024.2436634
News
- We want to hear from you about your experience with hydrologic design: which topics do you deal with? Which data and guidelines do you use? Are you in contact with practitioners? Help us collecting this information by filling out our survey at here.
- What are the major challenges when it comes to hydrologic design? The leading group of the WG has collected challenges and knowledge gaps to inspire the community to develop new standard for hydrologic design. Find the paper in the Hydrological Sciences Journal here.