Frontiers in river flow monitoring: hydrologic extremes, complex flows, unstable sites, uncertainties
Water is our planet’s most valuable resource. It is crucial for life, for food, for energy, for business. Effective management of this resource is therefore a global imperative.
Growing human populations, combined with an apparent increase in the frequency and magnitude of extreme weather events, bring an added urgency to the need for effective quantification of water in the world’s rivers.
To effectively manage water resource availability and flood risk, while maintaining a water environment beneficial to ecology, requires accurate, reliable and timely river flow measurements. Increasingly, these measurements must also be delivered against a backdrop of decreasing resources, both human and financial.
The need therefore is for safe, resilient and cost-effective methods for the accurate and timely quantification of the discharge rate of the world’s rivers. These methods must provide consistency of results over time through resilience to the impacts of major floods and other physical change factors, while retaining the sensitivity to allow accurate assessment of even the lowest of flows. To ensure the continued validity of long term records, new methods must be demonstrated to introduce no systematic bias to results.
This session focuses on innovative new technologies and techniques for determining river flows, and welcomes contributions with an emphasis on measuring the extremes, and dealing with difficult sites and conditions. Contributions are also invited which describe methods for effectively quantifying uncertainties associated with river discharge determinations.