John C. Rodda

Towards a world hydrological cycle observing system

Abstract There are considerable difficulties in assembling global hydrological data sets in near real time, data that might be used for deciding investment for sustainable water resources development and management, for environmental protection and for studying global change. Several reasons exist for these difficulties, a new one is that many countries have recently been cutting back on hydrological networks and the services that operate them. This means that knowledge of the Worlds water resources is getting worse when the global demand for water is accelerating. By way of contrast, meteorologists have ready access to large volumes of global data, much of it in real time, principally through WMOs World Weather Watch (WWW). A World Hydrological Cycle Observing System (WHYCOS) is proposed to facilitate access to global data and support hydrological services in need. A world-wide network of about 1000 stations is planned for the largest rivers, together with associated data bases and products to meet the...

No More Water à la Carte

Governments are cutting funds for hydrological services just as the demand for water is rising. Data on water resources are vital to ensure that the present situation of the Aral Sea is not replicated all over the world.

Data, Data Everywhere, Nor Any Drop to Drink

Water, particularly the fresh water that occupies the land phase of the hydrological cycle, is uniquely placed for characterizing global environmental change. Its movement powers the different geochemical cycles, and it moderates the global energy budget: at the same time, water is essential to virtually every human activity and is a key to development. As a consequence, virtually every human activity has an impact on water resources. Sometimes these are insignificant, but more often they result in changes to the volume and distribution of water in space and/or time and/or changes to its chemical, physical, and biological attributes. These changes are, of course, largely a consequence of the rapidly rising demand for water due to the population explosion and increasing affluence, coupled with the large volume of waste being discharged, often untreated, into the environment.

[Comment on “GEWEX: The Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment”] More global water balance uncertainty

I concur strongly with Chahines January 14, 1992, Eos article on GEWEX and support his response to Dincers letter (Eos, June 16, 1992) emphasizing that “our quantitative knowledge of the hydrological cycle remains surprisingly poor.” This is despite the magnificent report on the world water balance to which Dincer refers and his allusion that the existence of a low residual in closing the water balance indicates low errors of measurement of the global budget components.

Towards a funding future for hydrological services

Some national hydrological services have for many years been obliged to seek non‐governmental sources of funding; for others this is a new challenge. This article reviews the experiences of hydrological services which have successfully developed a range of services which they sell on a cost‐covering or commercial basis to other government departments or agencies, or to the private sector. It may not always be possible for hydrological services to compensate for government funding reductions without curtailing their activities, and in other cases government financial rules and objectives may cause difficulties.

Supporting world hydrology: Activities of International Hydrological Programs

When George Bernard Shaw, through the exertions of professor Higgins, caused Eliza Doolittle to recite “The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain,” he was most probably completely unaware of the hydrological consequences of the event. Not so the several agencies that together make up the Spanish hydrological service and are listed in the INFOHYDRO Manual [World Meteorological Organization, 1987]. They and their counterparts in the 159 other member countries of the World Meteorological Organization are intimately involved in routinely observing, recording, analyzing and forecasting the procession of hydrological phenomena that occur within their territories (Figure 1). These phenomena include floods and droughts, soil erosion, pollution incidents, landslides, avalanches, river ice formation and its break up in the spring. These agencies are also involved in water-resource assessment—just how much of the precipitation is available for man to use, primarily from the water draining out of a basin as river flows, and also from the water stored within it. When these responsibilities that link water issues with a variety of environmental matters are added to assessments of water usage in the different sectors, then the wide ranging and important responsibilities of hydrological services become very apparent. Perhaps Shaw was prudent in restricting Elizas utterances, rather than lacking in perspective—“prolonged precipitation in Peru provokes problems for operational hydrology” would not have exercised her vowels to the same extent.

U.K. Flow Regime Project Aids IHP III

The Flow Regimes from Experimental and Network Data (FREND) project was established in 1985 in the United Kingdom to undertake a 3-year project as the major contribution to Project 6.1 of the Third Phase of the International Hydrological Programme (IHP). The project was initiated by IHP with the objective of analyzing hydrological data from small research and national network basins to study the natural and man-made hydrological regimes. Although a number of individual basin studies have previously been carried out in the study area of northwest Europe, there have been few attempts to compare results from different countries or to provide techniques for generalizing or extrapolating research results beyond individual catchment boundaries. FREND seeks to overcome this deficiency by applying statistical analyses and modeling techniques to a large European data base.