Thursday, April 19, 2018

Medium term important questions in hydrology

This is part of the IAHS initiative in identifying some important questions in today's hydrology. As you know from the previous post, I made my eleven question questions. From the colleagues who participated to the call they received a decent agreement. However, during the phase of thinking, there was a refocusing (which I believe was useful) and a request to look to topics or issues that could be answered or solved in a few years. More specific, less oriented to basic questions.
This brought to a different set of questions (whose formulation I did not participated actively). Finally, Gunther Blöschl (GS) writes about the final screening that happened at the Wien Symposium: "On Saturday we had three rounds of discussions in four break out groups and one final plenary discussion. In each round we discussed the questions, merged them, split them and reworded them as needed followed by a voting on prioritising the questions. The voting was for gold/silver/bronze/remove in each of the three break out group rounds. Only the gold and silver ones were retained for the plenary with an additional round of voting (by the entire plenary) for gold, silver or removing them from the list. The idea of the process was to whittle down the 260 questions initially proposed to a more coherent and smaller set of those questions deemed most important by the participants. The process resulted in 16 gold and 29 silver questions which are posted here. "
I think it is important to see what was chosen to have a poll about what the community (mostly the European one?) thinks it is important, even if, maybe, not fundamental.

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