The future of hydrology education: Opportunities for state-of-the-art colloquium

Abstract:

Hydrology covers an extensive wide range of topics from atmospheric science to surface water and subsurface groundwater and directly interacts with other disciplines such as soil science, ecology, plant physiology, microbiology, etc. Over the past several decades, the hydrology arena has been modernized when new cross-disciplinary approaches became routinely applied in research. Some notable examples are scaling, geostatistics, stochastic transport phenomena, and remote sensing. Although not all were suitably added to the hydrology colloquium, such methods from other areas enormously revolutionized the hydrology field. Another prominent instance is theoretical approaches from statistical physics, in particular percolation theory that provides a promising theoretic framework to study interconnectivity and its effects on flow and transport in heterogeneous systems and networks, such as soils and rocks. Although percolation theory has been successfully applied in the physics literature, its concepts are relatively new to hydrology and its concrete applications have been limited. Preferential flow, hysteresis, non-Gaussian solute transport, and global water balance are still big challenges in hydrology, even though significant progress has been recently achieved. Within the percolation theory framework, one can successfully address such challenges. Therefore, it would be a potential opportunity for a state of the art colloquium as a module in a new platform to address on-line learning challenges. It will benefit undergraduate and graduate students with new skillsets and prepare them for a multidisciplinary work environment where they face new challenges every day.