More than 30 Working Groups have been suggested and, although the call to suggest Working Groups is now closed, you have until Friday, 29 September to sign up to an existing working group (link). The Working Groups are linked to three main themes:

• HELPING with global and local interactions
• HELPING with holistic solutions for water security
• HELPING with cross-cutting goals.

We invite you to apply for the role of Theme Leader for one of the three clusters of Working Groups. Leaders will be appointed biennially during the decade as per the previous IAHS Scientific decades (PUB and Panta Rhei). The role of the Theme Leaders will be to coordinate activities within each cluster of Working Groups, to share information, follow up on progress, arrange meetings and joint activities such as workshops, outreach activities, collaborative publications or projects. They will help and guide the appointed Working Group Leaders, and they will report to the IAHS management team (see figure on organisation below).

To be considered as a potential Theme Leader, please complete this Google Form before 15 October 2023. If you cannot access the online Google form, please contact the IAHS office on [email protected] for more assistance via a .pdf form. Each applicant will be contacted directly via email by the IAHS office and the following documents will be requested;

• A covering letter no longer than 1 page
• A resume no longer than 2 pages
• At least two contactable references.

Once all applications have been received by 15 October 2023, the call will be closed and the IAHS management team will evaluate the applications based on documented leadership skills, scientific knowledge in the field, experience in community management, and personal engagement/qualities. The results will be announced in November.

Keep updated on the timetable and the strategic planning process of HELPING at the IAHS website HERE! 

The next IAHS decade is dedicated to local solutions under the global water crisis. The short name is HELPING, and stands for Hydrology Engaging Local People IN one Global world. Read more in the Concept Note.

HELPING underpins solutions for the water crisis, leaving no catchment or hydrologist behind, in search for scientific evidence to:

·          Accelerate the understanding of the linkages between hydrological processes at local and global scales and their interaction with water resources.
·          Engage with local scientists and societies to learn from local experience, differences in hydrological processes and change around the world, and transfer solutions globally.
·          Synthesise hydrological understanding across the globe and underpin the management of current crises by finding holistic solutions to mitigate future crises.

The Community effort

The decade seeks for a bottom-up process empowered by local hydrologists and scientists using open science and local data/methods when solving local water problems. We envisage that the building of local knowledge and cooperation can inform scientists working under similar situations or facing unexpected events worldwide (e.g. learning from floods or droughts in one catchment will inform hydrologists and water management in other catchments).

After outcomes of several online interactions and workshops during the year, as summarised in the Córdoba document and Vienna document, the new scientific decade was launched during the IUGG General Assembly in Berlin, Germany in July (Fig. 1),  including the selection of a logo (Fig 2.) to represent the decade. The strategic planning document describes how the community’s vision will be translated into action by engaging the IAHS membership. These documents along with comments in the archive of the online Forum are the basis for writing a visionary community paper in HSJ, to which all participants soon will be invited for Author contributions.

Fig 1. The proposed strategic planning process (SPP) version 1.0

Fig. 2. Winning logo for the HELPING Science for Solutions decade voted on by those present at the IUGG Assembly in Berlin.

Way forward

Some 30 Working Groups have been suggested so far and the call is now closed. You can still sign up to an existing working group until the end of September (link).

The working groups are linked to three main themes:

·          HELPING with global and local interactions
·          HELPING with holistic solutions for water security
·          HELPING with cross-cutting goals

The IAHS management team act as a coordinating Steering Group setting up the structure for the decade to facilitate engagement from IAHS Commissions and Working groups. After mid-September an open call will be announced at the IAHS website for leaders of the three Working Group Themes. Leaders will be appointed biennially during the decade as per the previous IAHS Scientific decades (PUB and Panta Rhei, Fig. 3). The IAHS President Berit Arheimer is leading the initial phase 2023-2024. Everyone who signed up as working group members will be invited to an online meeting in November when the Working Groups will be finalised. Another aim is to wrap-up by the end of the year the IAHS HELPING community paper for publication in HSJ by the end of the year.

Keep updated on the time-table and next call for participation at the IAHS website HERE! 

Fig 3. https://iahs.info/Initiatives/Topic-for-the-Next-IAHS-decade/  

The availability of long and reliable time series of hydrological measurements is essential for hydrological analyses and research; however, these series are often fragmented and not easily accessible because parts of the measurements are still stored in printed volumes of the Hydrological Yearbooks. For this reason, Paola Mazzoglio (Politecnico  di Torino) and Miriam Bertola (TU Wien) have recently launched a citizen science project to digitize historical hydrological measurements in Italy. The project seeks to involve not only hydrologists but also ordinary people in the crowdsourcing of the data gathering and processing for advancing hydrological research, contributing to the transdisciplinary action of the IAHS CANDHY (Citizen AND HYdrology) Working Group. Anyone wishing to contribute, even with just 10 minutes of their time, can find an easy digitisation tool on the project website.

Project page:

https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/siren-project/siren-project 

IAHS CANDHY web page

https://iahs.info/Initiatives/Working-Groups/Candhy.do 

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.