IAHS continues to search for a new topic for the Next Scientific Decade. The workshop held in Córdoba 1-3 February was engaging with almost 50 scientists from across the globe participating in intense discussions resulting in many different suggestions and ideas. The consolidated outcome document as well as an updated time-plan is now available on the IAHS website.  The discussions indicate that the 3rd decade will be solution oriented and will search to find a scientific basis for understanding and reducing the local effects from the rising global water crisis in the Anthropocene.

However, we still search to narrow the focus, if possible, and to find an inspiring, overarching and catchy name. Therefore, we would like to encourage all members to participate in our quick survey by answering 1-3 simple questions. Once you have read and had a chance to reflect upon the outcome document, please click below and answer (anonymously) the survey by 28 Feb at the latest: Click here for the survey.

The Córdoba outcome document is a consolidation of the reflective and creative input by the IAHS community in: 

·        the Cordoba workshop (50 people) for three days,
·        online meetings (100 people) in three time-zones,
·        posts in a forum (40 comments) of the IAHS website.

Save the date – 29th April
The next step in the process will include a small team of 15 people who will draft a concept note, which will be available for commenting by mid-March and communicated at the UN Conference On Water in New York 22-24 March. A splinter meeting will be organised at EGU on Thursday 27 April, followed by a workshop to be held at Technical University of Wien on Saturday 29 April. 

Please register here for the workshop in Vienna on Saturday 29 April where we will discuss Actions and Leadership for the Next Scientific Decade (detailed agenda to follow at a later date). All completed registration forms must be sent to [email protected]

The winner of the first IAHS Falkenmark Award for best PhD thesis has been announced as Dr Afua Owusu from Ghana for her innovative interdisciplinary approach to re-operation of reservoirs for environmental flows.

Afua focussed on the success and failures to implement dam re-operations for environmental flows using an interdisciplinary approach. She managed to both evaluate global challenges and identify key factors for successful dam re-operation, using surveys as well as multi-sectorial trade-offs in the Lower Volta River Basin in Ghana, making use of an Evolutionary Multi-Objective Direct Policy Search.

The Falkenmark Award for best PhD thesis:

Recognises outstanding contributions to hydrological understanding of water scarcity and water supply.
Is granted every year, starting 2023 (nomination must be submitted no later than 31 December 2022).
Highlights the importance of capacity building and knowledge/data gathering in financially disadvantaged countries.

Eligible nominees:

Grew up in a financially disadvantaged country.
Performed the PhD work in one or more financially disadvantaged countries.
Holds a PhD certificate, which is dated within the last 2 years.

The award will be presented at the IUGG 2023 General Assembly. 

The deadline for submitting abstracts and applications for travel grants to attend the IUGG General Assembly 2023, which will be held in Berlin, Germany, has been extended to 21 February 2023.

The IAHS-led programme will be over the first half of the Assembly ie 12-16 July 2023.

Details of the IAHS symposia:
IAHS standalone symposia: click here     
Inter-Association symposia led by IAHS: click here  
and several other symposia led by sister associations with an IAHS involvement and hydrological perspective: click here   

The 28th IUGG General Assembly will be held July 11-20, 2023 at the CityCube in Berlin, Germany. This is a special opportunity for participants from around the world to come together and share their science and culture. Join us for a host of scientific activities, including special public lectures, keynote Union lectures and a wide variety of themed sessions.

The IAHS-led programme will be over the first half of the Assembly ie 12-16 July 2023.

Abstract submission and online registration are now open on the website:
Abstracts must be submitted by 14 February 2023: click here  
Registration: click here    
Submission of a travel grant application: click here

Details of the IAHS symposia:
IAHS standalone symposia: click here     
Inter-Association symposia led by IAHS: click here  
and several other symposia led by sister associations with an IAHS involvement and hydrological perspective: click here   

After two successful decades (PUB and Panta Rhei), IAHS want to once more boost the community through launching a third topic for collaborative efforts in hydrological sciences. The overall aim of the Scientific Decade is to accumulate knowledge and streamline research efforts worldwide. 

An open in-person event will be held 1-3 February 2023 in Córdoba, Spain, to decide on the topic for the next scientific decade. Ideas are already being discussed in the online forum. To enable a wider community input we are running three online sessions in different time-zones for remote discussions to further feed in to the plenary sessions in Cordoba (see questions below). 

To join a free online session you need to register in advance:

Oceania/Asia region organised by Barry Croke and Chris Leong: Monday 30th January 2pm AEDT https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/iahs-scientific-decade-oceaniaasia-region-tickets-522203222897  

Europe/Africa region (part 1) organised by Christophe Cudennec and Jean-Marie Kileshye: Wednesday 1st February 10-12 CET https://www.eventbrite.com/e/iahs-cordoba-workshop-online-session-for-europeafrica-time-zones-cet-tickets-523784773357 

Europe/Africa region (part 2) organised by Melody Sandells: Thursday 2nd February 10:30-12:30 CET https://www.eventbrite.com/e/iahs-cordoba-workshop-2nd-online-session-for-europeafrica-time-zones-cet-tickets-524484626637 

North/South America region organised by Stacey Archfield and Giova Mosquera: Tuesday 31st January 1-3pm EST https://www.eventbrite.com/e/next-iahs-scientific-decade-discussion-south-north-america-tickets-524650562957 

Questions to be discussed and reported in Córdoba:

Input requested for Plenum 1 Feb at 14 hrs CET:

1. What defines a successful Scientific Decade?
2. What do we want to achieve in the long-term and short-term, respectively?

Input requested for Plenum 2 Feb at 10 hrs CET:

1. What are the current drivers/trends in Fundamental and Applied Research?
2. What are the societal needs of scientific results?
3. Where to position IAHS? (vs other global scientific communities)

Input requested for Plenum 2 Feb at 14 hrs CET:

1. Brainstorm potential topics (and sub-topics/science questions) of the Next decade!
2. Identify short and catchy names
3. Make a brief SWOT analysis for each one (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats)

NOTE: the voting for new topic will only be made by participants in Cordoba – and announced in the evening (CET) of Day 2!

Input requested for Plenum 3 Feb at 10 hrs CET:

1. Identify sub-topics, science questions and Results of the Next Scientific Decade!
2. Suggest an organisational structure and communication/work activities, based on previous experience from global community building.

Please, join us and contribute to the community effort to define the next scientific decade!

The 28th IUGG General Assembly will be held July 11-20, 2023 at the CityCube in Berlin, Germany. This is a special opportunity for participants from around the world to come together and share their science and culture. Join us for a host of scientific activities, including special public lectures, keynote Union lectures and a wide variety of themed sessions.

The IAHS-led programme will be over the first half of the Assembly ie 12-16 July 2023.

Abstract submission and online registration are now open on the website:
Abstracts must be submitted by 14 February 2023: click here  
Registration: click here    
Submission of a travel grant application: click here

Details of the IAHS symposia:
IAHS standalone symposia: click here     
Inter-Association symposia led by IAHS: click here  
and several other symposia led by sister associations with an IAHS involvement and hydrological perspective: click here   

The 2021 IAHS ultimate frisbee game: a technical note

In the troubled times of 2021, the IAHS ultimate frisbee game was like no other. For the first time in its history, the game was postponed for one year and was held in 2022. Nonetheless, the game was highly anticipated and therefore it attracted a record number of participants: around 60! 

Following what any hydrological modeller should do before applying its model, and because these conditions had never been encountered before, a differential split sample test was applied to the participants. First, the crowd of participants was split into two equal parts. Second, contrasted samples of participants were constituted: on one side the dark-coloured shirt players, on the other side the light-coloured shirt players. This thorough protocol enabled to assess the robustness of ultimate players. 

Due to the high number of players and the subsequent high number of necessary operations to process, it was unanimously decided to parallelize the event. Two games were played in parallel, half of the dark-coloured shirt team played against half of the light-coloured shirt team, while the other two halves played against each other. This old-fashioned manner to run the game faster did not satisfy all players. Indeed, some of the youngest, and therefore geekiest, players, decided that using the cloud was a better option. Unfortunately for them, throwing Frisbee disks to clouds only resulted in losing them, although one of them was found back into the nearby Lez River. 

The boundaries between the two games were porous and some unintended interactions between the two games were noted. Still, parallel computing, although not being a 100 % perfect method, has a bright future ahead, and outperformed cloud computing. This report being a technical note, we decided to focus on the methodology only and the results will not be detailed here. For more details, the readers are invited to read our next papers. 

The 2019 IAHS frisbee game: an ensemble approach

The 2019 IAHS ultimate frisbee game was held at the Montréal Champ-de-Mars green area, in front of the City townhall. The participants decided to constitute two groups, the Ensemble Kalman Filter (EnKF) team and the Particle Filter team, aiming at comparing these two data assimilation approaches that are widely used in hydrology to incorporate real-time data into models. 

A dozen of participants were in each team, constituting the members (or particles) of these two ensembles. As the EnKF generally necessitates less members than the Particle filter, the EnKF team started the game with high confidence. Consequently, after the first observation of a Frisbee disk was made on the field, they scored the first point with high accuracy. 

Confident with this early victory, all members of the EnKF team decided to stay close together before the next Frisbee observation. On the other side, the Particle filter team adopted a different tactic: applying the well-known principle of natural selection, a.k.a. the sequential importance resampling, its particles performing the less were simply discarded from the team. To keep a similar number of players, its best elements were replicated. While this could have lead to a lack of diversity in the Particle filter, this methodology proved to be efficient for the next Frisbee disk observations. Oppositely, due to a too high proximity, the EnKF team members collided and suffered from a collapse and could not score again. 

While the game resulted in a large victory for the Particle Filter team, the EnKF team strongly argued that if multiple spatially-distributed observations of Frisbee disks were made, instead of one at a time, the Particle Filter team would have struggled and they would have easily won the game. That might be further investigated in following games. 

View our Facebook page for more about this fun event in Montpellier!

HYDROLOGICAL SCIENCES JOURNAL 

Editor in Chief: Attilio Castellarin
Co-Editors: Stacey Archfield, Aldo Fiori, Konstantinos Soulis, and Riddhi Singh.

Hydrological Sciences Journal provides a forum for original papers and discussion of significant developments in hydrological science and practice, and related disciplines.

The Impact Factor of HSJ is 3.942 (©2022 Clarivate Analytics, 2021 Journal Citation Reports®) with a 5-year Impact Factor of 3.879, ranking it 31st out of 100 journals in the Water Resources category.

Institutions and libraries should order direct from Taylor & Francis or their usual agent.

Special journal subscription rates are available to IAHS Members: £27.00 for a personal online subscription, and £48.00 for a personal online + print subscription.  IAHS Members should order by contacting [email protected] 

Access to the back archive is free - explore 63 volumes of cutting-edge research and discovery.

IAHS members from the following countries are eligible for 80% discount on book prices, subject to the minimum price restriction, and free online access to HSJ via the IAHS website:

Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Angola, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Belarus, Belize, Benin, Bhutan, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Botswana, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cabo Verde, Cambodia, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Colombia, Comoros, Congo, Côte d'Ivoire, Cuba, Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Dominican Republic, East Timor, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Fiji, Gabon, Gambia, Georgia, Ghana, Guatemala, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, India, Indonesia, Iran (Islamic Republic of), Iraq, Jamaica, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kiribati, Kosovo, Kyrgyzstan, Lao People's Democratic Republic, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Macedonia, Republic of, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Marshall Islands, Mauritania, Micronesia, Moldova, Mongolia, Montenegro, Morocco, Mozambique, Myanmar, Namibia, Nepal, Nicaragua, Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan, Palestine, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Rwanda, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Samoa, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Serbia, Sierra Leone, Solomon Islands, Somalia, South Africa, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Swaziland, Syrian Arab Republic, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Thailand, Togo, Tonga, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Tuvalu, Uganda, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Vanuatu, Vietnam, Yemen, Zambia, Zimbabwe

List of eligible countries with GDP per capita smaller than the median of all countries of the world (UN data, 2016)

N.B.This list is subject to revision.

IAHS invites you to participate in the discussion for the next IAHS Scientific Decade

Over the past 20 years, IAHS has initiated two scientific decades, which set the research agenda worldwide through collaborative forces.

2003-2012:  Predictions in Ungauged Basins (PUB)
2013–2022: Panta Rhei—Everything Flows: Change in hydrology and society.

After two successful decades, IAHS want to once more boost the community through launching a third topic for collaborative efforts in hydrological sciences. IAHS invites you to join our online discussion to contribute to the process and to share your ideas.

The overall aim with a Scientific Decade is to accumulate knowledge and streamline research efforts worldwide. Previous experiences has showed that such initiatives foster engagement, sharing and collective focus to better understand specific hydrological problems or phenomena - and thereby accelerate scientific achievements. 

Click on the image below to access the discussion forum.