Hydrologic Design: Solutions and Communication

Hydrologic design is one of the key tasks of hydrologists and most important for the majority of stakeholders, authorities and practitioners. Generally, hydrologic design consists of the dimensioning of hydro-structures in order to fulfill a pre-specified purpose related to water, e.g. flood protection or water supply. Hydrologic design, therefore, is a key element also for engineering activities beyond the hydrological application, and therefore must be communicated to the interested parties in an appropriate and comprehensive way.

In this context, the “Hydrologic Design: Solutions and Communications” working group aims at:

1- development of novel, goal-oriented procedures for the design of hydrologic solutions for the societal problems (e.g. extremes like floods and droughts, water management, control of water contamination etc.), bringing the best of the available methods;

2- development of novel methods to improve the understanding, characterization, quantification and reduction of uncertainty in hydrology, which will be able to extrapolate the results to data-scarce regions, ungauged catchments or beyond the observation range. The usage of available information from local sources will be improved, by combining different sources of information;

3- advances towards more reliable predictions by innovating the combination of the knowledge from deterministic models, probabilistic models and artificial intelligence methods, as well as, analyzing the predicted problem from different angles.

We plan to involve the stakeholders into the whole process of acquisition, modeling and/or concluding. Altogether, this will result in a simplified communication of hydrological design and the corresponding uncertainty to stakeholders, local people and authorities and, hence, strengthen the connection between science and practice.