What can hydrology offer to climate science, and vice versa, and what is their connection to the ever-changing human societies?
During the past two decades our understanding of Earth’s water cycle has improved significantly due to the vast amount of station and satellite observations, as well as paleoclimatic reconstructions. However, it has become apparent that hydrological processes are still not fully deciphered, which hinders our ability to incorporate them into existing hydrological modeling applications.
Water cycle processes are also tightly linked to climate: Water vapor is by far the most important greenhouse gas; conversely, diachronic changes to climate impact hydrology. While hydrological change is influenced by many factors in addition to climate, and climate includes processes other than hydrological, nonetheless it would seem that one has to study water cycle and climate together, particularly if one wants to characterize future hydrological conditions with intense impacts to human systems - e.g. water availability or flood hazards - and uncertainties thereof.
The objectives of this session include the investigation of the water cycle and climatic variability both in regional and planetary scale, the exploration of the effect of scale in hydrological and climatic processes, the advancement of our understanding of the hydrological cycle, the reconciliation of hydroclimatic paleoclimate records with theory and simulations, the improvement of the efficiency of data-driven modeling techniques and 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 is related to the new scientific decade 2013–2022 of IAHS, entitled “Panta Rhei - Everything Flows”.