During the past decade our understanding of the hydrological cycle has significantly improved thanks to a plethora of scientific forums, research contributions and observations, either from ground-based gauging sites or from satellite data. However, we are still unable to explain time variability of hydro-meteorological processes and related trends. While a lot of efforts have been spent to decipher the effect of human impact and the connection, co-evolution and feedback between hydrology and related systems, we still cannot provide an interpretation for long term trends and cycles that affect hydrological variables. As a result, it is difficult to make a difference between natural and non-natural trends, and identify the changes that may be due to human action. The objective of this session is to explore hydrological and climatic time variability and their connections and feedbacks. More specifically, the session aims to:
1. investigate the water cycle and climatic variability both at regional and global scales,
2. explore the effect of scale in hydrological and climatic processes,
3. advance our understanding of the hydrological cycle, benefiting from paleoclimatic hydrological records,
4. improve the efficiency, simplicity, and accurate characterization of data-driven modeling techniques to quantify the impacts of past, present and future hydroclimatic change to human societies.
This session is sponsored by the International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS) and the World Meteorological Organization – Commission for Hydrology (WMO CHy) and it is also related to the scientific decade 2013–2022 of IAHS, entitled “Panta Rhei - Everything Flows”.