Lucy Veale said “The aim was to produce a short film that would showcase the value of arts and humanities research in understanding environmental change, through their focus on landscape, culture and imagination. Titled ‘Imagining Change: Coastal Conversations’, the film features three projects that showcase different kinds of creative engagements between arts and humanities scholars and coastal landscapes. The main body of the film consists of interviews/conversations between Programme Director Stephen Daniels and our kind contributors Caitlin DeSilvey, Mike Pearson and Simon Read. We encourage people to use the film and have a variety of formats available for distribution”.

Please keep Lucy informed about how it is used by emailing: lucy.veale@nottingham.ac.uk

Unfortunately I had to miss some of the talks because of clashes with papers in other sessions but the theme that was common to both the splinter meeting and visionary session is that the new decade should address the impacts of change in catchments.   It was clear that this meant different things to different people, from the co-evolution of hydrology and society, to the long term impacts of pollution, and the uncertainty of trying to make statements about future climate change.  What was common to all, however, was the view that the stresses to society  resulting from change and long term trends were going to be serious and needed to be addressed with some urgency.

It is perhaps worth noting that the prediction of ungauged basins was (and is) really an impossible problem.   We simply do not have enough information about catchment characteristics to be able to predict the response of ungauged areas with any certainty.   PUB was, however, successful in the sense of encouraging a new look at the problem and the science plan was quite explicit in recognising the difficulty of the problem and in suggesting that it was an issue of trying to constrain the uncertainty in making such predictions.   The prediction of change is also an impossible problem.   In this case, the dependence of hydrological predictions on the specification of boundary conditions is the issue.  We simply cannot know enough about future boundary conditions (remember that those arising from climate change models are only scenarios with very specific assumptions, and even then they need fixing by bias corrections and downscaling methods before they can be used with hydrological models).

We also cannot know enough about boundary conditions in looking at past change and I also made the point in my talk that except in some rather extreme cases of catchment change, our data are not generally good enough for assessing the impacts of past changes.  I therefore made the argument for using the initiative to commission designs for new, more accurate, measurement systems for all the hydrological variables we need: discharge, catchment precipitation, actual evapotranspiration and changes in catchment storage.   It would be possible to use a design process similar to that used in the specification of satellite and astronomical instrumentation.   I seem to remember that I made a similar suggestion at the beginning of PUB, since one solution to the ungauged catchment problem is to make measurements at a proportional level of investment.   Observational techniques have improved over the last 10 years of course but are still not adequate for doing hydrological science properly.   Given what depends on future catchment water management and its evolution with global society, this would seem to be an investment worth making.

If you would like to contribute to the discussions about the next hydrological decade or simply read what has already been posted, there is a public blog run by Alberto Montanari at http://distart119.ing.unibo.it/iahs.

And to see more of Phil’s photos from EGU Vienna 2012

ESKTN, together with its European partners on the FP7 WaterDiss project have organised a Summer School on Flood Risk Management. The aim of the Summer School is to provide an opportunity for talented young researchers (post docs), PhD students or freelancers from all over Europe to work closely with some of the leading academics, researchers and practitioners in the field.

For more details

Click here to see more of Phil’s photos from the meeting

Forthcoming International Conference at Lancaster University, UK  

25th June – 27th June 2012 

Over the last three years the Catchment Change Network (CCN) has organised a programme of workshops and meetings to discuss and develop guidelines for incorporating risk and uncertainty into the management of catchment change in the areas of flood risk, water scarcity and diffuse pollution. This final international conference will present the progress that has been made in that time in both the CCN and other projects. A particular focus will be on the research needs in both modelling the impacts of change at scales of implementation and on stakeholder involvement in the management process. Keynote speakers include Eric Wood (Princeton University), Jay Famiglietti (University of California, Irvine), Thorsten Wagener (Penn State and Bristol Universities) Keith Beven and Phil Haygarth (Lancaster University), with others still to be confirmed.

Offers of talks and posters will be accepted until May 11th.

To register on-line for this free event, please follow this link.

If you have any further questions please contact Marion (marion.walker@lancaster.ac.uk) or call +44(0)1524 510290.

The CCN conference will be followed directly by the celebratory workshop GLUE: 20 years on which will continue through to Thursday lunchtime.

2012 marks the 20th anniversary of the first Generalised Likelihood Uncertainty Estimation GLUE paper by Beven and Binley in 1992 and has, in addition, just passed 1000 citations on the Web of Science. The GLUE methodology has been controversial; viewed by some as simply wrong, by others as an earlier version of Approximate Bayesian Computation, and by others as a useful way of trying to reflect the impacts of epistemic errors on complex error structures in environmental modelling. This workshop will have the aim of reviewing: the way in which the GLUE controversy has illuminated the debate about how to assess uncertainty in environmental models; the philosophy that underlies the GLUE methodology; and some examples of using GLUE in practice. The workshop will start at lunchtime on Wednesday 27th June and finish at lunchtime on Thursday 28th June and will include both oral and paper presentations. The first day will be completed by a celebratory dinner in the evening.

The workshop will follow on directly from the final Catchment Change Network International Conference  on Stakeholders, next generation models, and risk in managing catchment change.

To register on-line for this free GLUE event, please follow this link.

If you have any further questions please contact Marion (marion.walker@lancaster.ac.uk) or call +44(0)1524 510290