Hydrology has evolved from its origins as a problem-driven applied engineering discipline to one of the building blocks of earth and environmental science. Furthermore, the purview of the subject has increased from the point and plot, to the watershed, regional, and even to the global scale. Hydrologists now investigate the distribution and spatial-temporal variation of water in both the terrestrial and atmospheric components of the global water system. Hydrologic problems have also increased in complexity, due to the necessary inclusion of chemical and biological aspects of the hydrological cycle to address topics such as water quality and ecosystem functioning.
As the demands on current and future hydrologists have changed, the concern arises that hydrologists’ training has not kept pace. Today, educators and students are increasingly challenged to find or develop up to date educational materials.
These challenges are not confined to academia, as federal agencies are also asking how employees with these broad interdisciplinary skills can be educated. Hydrology has evolved from a discipline dominated by advancements of individual scientists, toward an interdisciplinary field.
Markus Weiler and other scientists carried out a survey (Wagener et al 2007*) on the educational material in use, and on the background and affiliations of the educators involved. This provided a very interesting view on the great diversity to be found in hydrology education, and suggests that hydrology instructors are challenged to communicate a consistent approach to the subject. This diversity of approaches may be one reason for the fact that some 40% of educators do not use a textbook as an in-class resource, and of those that do (100 individuals) a total of 52 different textbooks were listed.
There is a clear need for an affordable text book that provides a physically based approach to understanding processes in catchment hydrology and which covers the wide variety of principles, processes and models necessary to analyze and predict the hydrologic effects of environmental change, human activity and watershed management. We therefore plan a textbook that provides coverage of:
- Fundamental concepts in hydrology, hydrostatics, hydrodynamics, statistics and measurement techniques
- Water movement and storage in the environment and its relation to the different hydrological processes
- Methods and techniques in catchment hydrology
- Impact and prediction of environmental change, human activity and watershed management on catchment hydrology.
*Wagener, T., Weiler, M., McGlynn, B., Marshall, L., McHale, M., Meixner, T. and McGuire, K. 2007. Taking the pulse of hydrology education. Hydrological Processes, 21, 1789–1792. doi:10.1002/hyp.6766
To view a copy of this paper see:
http://water.engr.psu.edu/wagener/PublicationsPDFs/HP2007%20Wagener%20et%20al..pdf
