At the H15 History of Hydrology Session at the IAHS meeting in Berlin in July 2023 a new initiative was announced to fund the creation of a complete archive of the works of Robert Elmer Horton (1875-1945) who was the pre-eminent hydrologist of the English speaking world in the first half of the 20th Century.   He was a founder member and first vice-President of the Hydrological Section of the AGU.   On his death his papers were organised by Walter Langbein into 94 boxes and placed in the US National Archives.   As far as we know, these have only been accessed three times:  about 20 years ago by Keith Beven (KB) who examined 10 of the boxes (see Beven JH, 2004, HP, 2004a,b); by Jim Smith of Princeton who accessed some more in preparing for his AMS Horton Lecture; and most recently by Solomon Vimal, currently at Cornell Tech.   

Solomon discovered the value of Horton’s work on Lake Evaporation as part of his PhD thesis.  He has recently been on a long road trip (funded personally and by the MIRA Foundation) to visit Horton’s home in Voorheesville, NY (where apparently there are are still some old instruments in the barn), the nearby Horton Falls (formerly the LaGrange falls, with an interesting history of a land dispute with the LaGrange family), his alma mater of Albion College (which holds still more of his papers) and to Parma, Michigan where he was born (and where there are still Hortons).  Solomon’s searches have increased the known Horton published works from the 80 works listed in the biographical paper on Horton by Francis Hall in 1987, to over 200 (including a book of short stories).  We are still hoping that we will discover a new photograph of Horton to add the one that is always reproduced from when he was President of the American Meteorological Society.

We feel it would be valuable to the hydrological community to now produce an online archive of Horton’s works so that they can be much more accessible to all (right now only 86 of his papers are digitized and available via the Influential Hydrologists project of the AGU Hydrology section, initiated by Efi Foufoula-Georgiou).  KB can personally vouch for the fact that what is in the few boxes he managed to look at is absolutely fascinating (including an unpublished Manual of Infiltration) and gives new insights into Horton’s character and ideas – which were much more sophisticated than the simple  “infiltration excess overland flow” concept for which he is now remembered.   Solomon has had 4 of the boxes of papers held there scanned so there are just another 90 boxes to go!  

20 years ago it was possible only to take photocopies of the most important papers. With more modern technology it would be possible to digitise all of the material – but this will require funding for staff time and hosting the archive.  Hence the idea of crowd funding the initiative.  If you feel this is a worthwhile project then please donate (any amount large or small) at the GoFundMe site  https://tinyurl.com/roberthorton 

Keith Beven (Lancaster University) with Efi Foufoula-Georgiou (UC Irvine), Vijay P. Singh (Texas A&M)

Beven, K J, 2004, Surface runoff at the Horton Hydrologic Laboratory (or not?), J. Hydrology, 293, 219-234.

Beven, K J, 2004, Robert Horton's perceptual model of infiltration, Hydrological Processes, 18, 3447-3460.

Beven, K J, 2004, Robert Horton and abrupt rises of groundwater, Hydrological Processes, 18, 3687-3696.

The STAHY 2023 workshop brings together the international statistical hydrology community for vibrant scientific discussions and debates on advanced statistical methods for hydrological applications. This year's theme aims to bridge the environmental statistics and artificial intelligence communities with vibrant scientific discussions and debates on advanced statistical methods to solve climate, water, and sustainability issues. Focusing on the broader scope of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) established by the United Nations in 2015, the theme of the workshop is expected to address several goals but are not limited to Clean Water and Sanitation (SDG 6), Sustainable Cities and Communities (SDG 11), Climate Action (SDG 13), and Life on Land (SDG 15). 

This year, the International Commission on Statistical Hydrology (ICSH) of the International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS) invites researchers to submit abstracts for presentation at the 13th International Workshop on Statistical Hydrology (STAHY2023), which will be hosted by Northeastern University in Boston, Massaschuetts (USA), from 8-10 November 2023.

All the information that you need to know about the workshop, the programme, registration, abstract submission, the committees, and the venue can all be found right here. 

The result of the IAHS Administrative Plenary vote held at IUGG Assembly in Berlin, July 2023, decided to implement a new International Commission on Human-Water Feedbacks (ICHWF). The motivation was to create a new IAHS Commission to capitalise on the momentum of the scientific decade Panta Rhei – Change in Hydrology and Society that was closed during the Panta Rhei Symposium in Potsdam at 10-11 July 2023. Panta Rhei has created a very active, young and diverse community of natural and social scientists. The new commission will provide a home for this community within IAHS after the end of the scientific decade and will attract new people to IAHS in the field of Human-Water Feedbacks.

Objective and Methods

The commission will focus on the feedbacks between humans and water over decadal and centennial time scales. The new commission is therefore mainly concerned with changes that involve a two-way coupling between human actions and water quantity and quality. Methods will mainly comprise long-term monitoring in case study areas, use of new data (e.g. text analysis of social media posts) and social sciences approaches (e.g. behavioural experiments) and modelling that explicitly account for feedbacks between water and social processes.

Role within IAHS 

The ICHWF will have a cross-sectional character and interact with all commissions and working groups of the IAHS. It will complement ICWRS by addressing more theoretical, long-term aspects with a stronger emphasis on feedbacks and coupling. Additionally, it will support the new scientific decade ‘HELPING – Hydrology Engaging Local People IN one Global world’ by better theoretical understanding of the long-term feedbacks underpinning sustainable development. The leadership team comprises the president Heidi Kreibich, three Vice-Presidents Anne van Loon, Saket Pande, Tobias Krüger and the secretary Melissa Haeffner.

The new commission President Heidi Kreibich reports: "Our first ideas for joint activities are the organisation of biennial summer schools on Human-Water Feedbacks, using the Panta Rhei book as a teaching material as well as a joint community-based study on testing human-water feedback models based on a compilation of socio-hydrological benchmark datasets compiled during the Panta Rhei decade" (Kreibich et al. 2023, Panta Rhei benchmark dataset: socio-hydrological data of paired events of floods and droughts. ESSD, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-15-2009-2023[HK1])

The final symposium for the scientific decade Panta Rhei – Change in Hydrology and Society brought together 150 hydrologists, engineers, social scientists and practitioners from 32 countries at the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences from 10-11 July 2023. The community celebrated the progress made in the Panta Rhei Scientific Decade, identified remaining issues, and discussed further steps. During the symposium, the Panta Rhei synthesis book "Coevolution and Prediction of Coupled Human-Water Systems" was launched.

Programme with diverse perspectives

Keynote lectures by Johan Rockström (Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany), Fuqiang Tian (Professor at Tsinghua University, China), Manuela Brunner (Professor at ETH Zurich, Switzerland) and Joerg Niewoehner (Director of the Integrative Research Institute on Transformations of Human-Environment Systems (IRI THESys), Germany) highlighted the phenomena, problems and possible solutions associated with the changes in the water cycle due to global change from the perspectives of climate science, hydrology and anthropology. 

More than 40 young scientists had the opportunity to present their detailed results of case studies from around the world in flashlight talks and posters. A group of students from the socio-hydrology course at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin presented their interdisciplinary work on human-water relations along the Panke River in Berlin-Brandenburg. Two international panel discussions and the visionary outlook by Günter Blöschl (Professor at TU Wien and Past-President of IAHS) rounded off the programme.

Panel discussion on remaining gaps and future research (panellists from left to right: Alberto Montanari, Archana Sarkar, Valeriya Ovcharuk, Mariana de Brito, Pedro Chaffe and moderator Christophe Cudennec).

Among the important findings of the Panta Rhei decade are the following:

• • Long-term developments, including feedbacks between natural and socio-economic processes, need to be understood, as their failure to be taken into account can lead to unintended, negative consequences of human interventions
  • A participatory approach involving stakeholders adds relevant detail and legitimacy to the research design, modelling and outcomes
  • Justice and equity issues need to be considered in research design, modelling and implementation
  • Flood and drought risk management needs to adopt a longer-term complex system view rather than focusing on short-term risk reduction
  • There is even more potential for learning from similar water problems in different places of the world.

Heidi Kreibich, Panta Rhei chair for the period 2021-2023, adds: "We expect further progress through the interplay of broadening and synthesis: for example, we need to learn even more from other people and studies, empower local populations and build alliances with other scientific communities, for example from climate research. The Panta Rhei decade came to an end, but the vibrant, active community will continue to work together in the new International Commission on Human-Water Feedbacks (ICHWF) and will support the new scientific decade ‘Science for solutions: Hydrology Engaging Local People IN one Global world (HELPING)’.”

The results of the 2023 elections held during the IAHS Administrative Plenary on Wednesday 12 July. The Vice-President office will be held for the period 2023-2027. The President was elected in 2023, becoming President-Elect for two years, with a mandate of 2025-2029. In 2025 the President becomes Past-President and the President-Elect becomes President.

We are pleased to announce that the HELPING Working Groups are now live and ready for you to view at your convenience. The Working Groups have been built by the community by submitting a proposal. The list of suggested Working Groups, together with their proposal documents as well as a sign up form, are now available and we would like to take this opportunity to encourage you to sign up to a Working Group.

IAHS now offers a new tool for sharing scientific research across the world – the Digital Water Globe (DWG). This online application is a spinning globe that links to a zoomable map of the world, tagged with site-specific scientific case-studies (i.e. permanent digital poster exhibition linked to the IAHS website). Filtering is possible through key-words and the first version is filled with examples of case-studies from each continent, provided by the DWG Task Force, the Panta Rhei working group and some Bureau members.

The tool is now open for everybody and all IAHS members can ask for a log-in to contribute with content, such as case-studies, personal profiles, references to IAHS publications and links to data storage. Everything is tagged to key-words to be searchable and findable by anyone.

This new platform offers a quick global overview of on-going scientific activities and achievements in the hydrological community at different sites across the world. It provides an opportunity for outreach and sharing among scientists of new results that are not published yet, or to promote existing publications of thrilling results to be cited. It will also serve citizens, as the filtering function can highlight scientific messages and provide facts in the public debate.

The prototype was shown at the IAHS Scientific Assembly in Montpellier, France in 2022 and now the tool is operational in time for the 28th IUGG General Assembly next week in Berlin, Germany. Enjoy!

Share your hydrological science easily and find relevant studies here: https://dwg.smhi.se/dwg 

The International Conference on Mountain Hydrology and Cryosphere will be held in Kathmandu and Dhulikhel, Nepal, on 9 and 10 November 2023. 

The conference will cover a wide range of topics concerning mountain hydrology, cryosphere and related topics. The meeting will be dedicated to the following topics but not limited to:

• Mountain hydrology, hydrological modeling, glacio-hydrological modeling
• Groundwater hydrology, isotope hydrology, aquatic ecology, water quality and wastewater
• Transboundary issues of water resources, water resources management
• Hydro-meteorology in agriculture
• Cryosphere, climate change, cryospheric changes and their impacts on water resources  
• Glacier mass balance, glacier surface and energy balance modeling
• Debris-covered glacier and rock glacier, sedimentation
• Permafrost hydrology and mapping
• Water-induced disasters, snow and ice avalanches, glacial lake and glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF), landslide and landslide damming outburst flood (LDOF)

The conference is organized by the Nepal Committee for the International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS), Himalayan Cryosphere, Climate and Disaster Research Center, Kathmandu University (HiCCDRC, KU) and The Small Earth Nepal (SEN). 

Abstract submission and online registration are now open https://www.iahs-nepal.org/icmhc-2023/registration-and-abstract-submission 

For additional information please visit the website: https://www.iahs-nepal.org/icmhc-2023 

HELPING Logo

This is a reminder that the logo of the HELPING decade will be found through an open competition. The winner will be selected through an open voting procedure at the IAHS meeting within the IUGG Assembly in Berlin. Your logo can be submitted as either .jpeg or .png or .pdf files and in a file size that is small enough to send via email. Please send your logo, together with a short description explaining your thoughts/ideas behind the design, to [email protected] before 30 June 2023.