I attended a tele-conference today (3/12/2018) organized by Jeffrey McDonnell, the President of the AGU Hydrology Section, for the Section’s Technical Committee (TC) chairs. There are a number of items that I would like to share with you and, at the meantime, to ask for your inputs.
AGU is planning for a number of activities for this year’s AGU Centennial celebration. One of them is to identify the breakthroughs that have been made in the last contrary. WRR (and actually all AGU journals) will have a special issues for hydrologic “game changers”, e.g., paradigm-shift concepts, innovative sensor techniques, and computational algorithms and/or software. The identification of breakthrough is more like a review of academic history of hydrology. How were the breakthroughs initiated? How did they get there? Which paper or papers were they originally published? What have we learned during the breakthrough-making process? For our TC, it would be interesting that we identify the game changers for hydrologic uncertainty analysis. Please come up with one or two breakthroughs, and justify why you think that they are truly breakthroughs.
Another activity is to identify grand challenges for AGU communities. This links to the effort of Unresolved Problem in Hydrology (UPH) initiated recently by the International Association of Hydrological Science, and more information of UPH can be found at https://iahs.info/IAHS-UPH.do. It would be interesting to identify the uncertainty-related grand challenges and to also offer some solution from your own perspective. The list of grand challenges may be useful for organizing a Chapman Conference in next couple of years focusing on UQ. Again, please come up with one or two grand challenges and offer your insights for addressing the challenges.
We always focus on a narrow range of problems related to our research, and these AGU requests help us think something BIG. I, personally, view it as a great opportunity to re-examine our own research and the research of the UQ community, so that the TC can offer thoughtful and insightful guidelines to the UQ community.
Three last but not least notes
- The AGU nomination deadline is 3/15/2018. Please nominate our colleagues for the hydrology section awards.
- AGU has started accepting session proposals, and the deadline is 4/18/2018.
- The hydrology section is exploring the idea of TC-led sessions, i.e., a session proposed by each TC for promoting the TC theme research. Should you have ideas for TC-led sessions, please let me know.
Please feel free to comment on this post, and add your inputs to the identification of game changes and grand challenges.
Ming Ye