A new view on the hydrological cycle over continents

GWI recently supported the UNSW School of Civil and Environmental Engineering in hosting a guest presentation by Dr Ruud van der Ent, Hydrologist from Delft University of Technology, Netherlands.

Dr van der Ent spoke about the moisture recycling process from different angles, exploring several new concepts and metrics developed to describe and understand the local to global scale moisture recycling process.

Professor Ashish Sharma from the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering praised the work of Dr van der Ent and said “Identifying moisture sources for a storm in turn allows identification of how land-use could be engineered to alter moisture sources for the area. Properly managed, this can in theory modulate excess precipitation in areas subject to flooding, and alleviate aridity in areas prone to drought. How these moisture sources change due to rising global temperatures even allows an insight into which areas will turn wet or dry."

Ruud van der Ent is an assistant professor in hydrology at the Department of Water Management of Delft University of Technology. Ruud holds a PhD from Delft University of Technology (2014) and previously worked at Witteveen+Bos Engineering Consultants and Utrecht University before returning to Delft.

Ruud is a 2017 Veni laureate, which is a research grant by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), and his Veni research “Unravelling the moisture sources in precipitation extremes worldwide” is his current main activity. Ruud is actively involved in the European Geosciences Union, and is the main builder of the now widely used atmospheric moisture tracking model WAM-2layers of which the main source code is available on Github. Ruud’s main research interests include: precipitation extremes, land-atmosphere interactions and tele-connections, and global hydrological modelling and has published around 20 peer-reviewed papers in these fields.