Hydrology is the scientific study of the movement, distribution, and management of water on Earth and other planets, including the water cycle, water resources, and drainage basin sustainability. A practitioner of hydrology is called a hydrologist. Hydrologists are scientists studying earth or environmental science, civil or environmental engineering, and physical geography. Using various analytical methods and scientific techniques, they collect and analyze data to help solve water related problems such as environmental preservation, natural disasters, and water management.
Vit Klemes was a Canadian hydrologist of Czech origin.
Rafael Luis Bras is a Puerto Rican civil engineer best known for his contributions in surface hydrology and hydrometeorology, including his work in soil-vegetation-atmosphere system modeling.
Seyed Majid Hassanizadeh is a professor of hydrogeology at Utrecht University, where he heads the Hydrogeology group at the Faculty of Geosciences. His research focuses on flow of fluids and transport of solutes and colloids in porous media, through theory development, experimental studies, and modeling work. In particular, he focuses on two-phase flow, reactive transport in variably-saturated porous media, transport of micro-organisms, and biodegradation.
Jasper A. Vrugt is a Dutch scientist/engineer/applied mathematician known for his work in the earth sciences: surface hydrology, soil physics, hydrogeophysics, hydrometeorology, and geophysics. Vrugt is an assistant professor at the University of California, Irvine and holds a joint appointment in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Department of Earth System Science. He also holds a part-time appointment as associate professor at the University of Amsterdam, Faculty of Science (CGE).
Murugesu Sivapalan is an Australian-American engineer and hydrologist of Sri Lankan Tamil origin and a world leader in the area of catchment hydrology. He is currently the Chester and Helen Siess Endowed Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and professor of Geography & Geographic Information Science, at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Sivapalan is widely recognized for his fundamental research on scale issues in hydrological modeling, his leadership of global initiatives aimed at hydrologic predictions in ungauged basins, and for his role in launching the new sub-field of socio-hydrology.
Keith John Beven is a British hydrologist and distinguished emeritus professor in hydrology at Lancaster University. According to Lancaster University he is the most highly cited hydrologist.
Diane McKnight is a distinguished professor of civil, environmental, and architectural engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder and a fellow at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR). McKnight is a founding principal investigator of the National Science Foundation's Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) program in the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica.
Dara Entekhabi is the Bacardi and Stockholm Water Foundations Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research spans a variety of topics in hydrology, including land-atmosphere interactions, surface water - groundwater interactions, data assimilation, and remote sensing.
Elfatih Ali Babiker Eltahir is a Sudanese -American Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, H.M. King Bhumibol Professor of Hydrology and Climate, and Director of the MIT-UM6P Research Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Professor Günter Blöschl is an Austrian hydrologist, engineer and academic.
Jean Marie Bahr is a hydrogeologist who examines how the physical and chemical composition of groundwater and how that controls the mass transportation of groundwater. She currently is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison in the department of geosciences.
Anne Jarvis Jefferson is an American hydrologist who specializes in watershed hydrology, urban hydrology, and hydroecology. As of 2023, she is the Patrick Chair in Watershed Science and Planning at the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Vermont. Previously she was an associate professor at Kent State University in the Department of Geology, which became the Department of Earth Sciences.
Terri S. Hogue is an American hydrologist. She is currently a professor and department head of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Colorado School of Mines. Her research focuses on different hydrologic and land surface processes in semi-arid regions and the implications of them on water resource management.
Georgia "Gia" Destouni is a Professor of Hydrology at Stockholm University. She works on the Baltic Sea Region Programme as well as studying the impact of climate change on societies in Northern Europe. She is the chair of the Global Wetland Ecohydrology Network (GWEN) and was involved with the National Geosphere Laboratory.
Efi Foufoula-Georgiou is a Distinguished Professor in the Civil and Environmental Engineering department at the University of California, Irvine. She is well known for her research on the applications of wavelet analysis in the fields of hydrology and geophysics and her many contributions to academic journals and national committees.
Ranjith Pathegama Gamage, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering, is an Australian academic based at Monash University, where he holds the position of Professor in Geomechanics Engineering. His research has significantly influenced understanding of the Carbon sequestration. He has also developed new sustainable technologies for extracting resources from deep earth and natural gas from coal seams, shale, and tight geological formations.
Michael Lehning is a German and Swiss environmental and atmospheric scientist. He is a professor of environmental engineering at EPFL, the head of EPFL's Laboratory of Cryospheric Sciences, and head of the group Snow Processes at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL).
Upmanu Lall is an Indian-American engineer and founding director of the Water Institute at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University. Lall also has a faculty appointment as professor in the School of Complex Adaptive Systems within the College of Global Futures. Prior to joining ASU in January 2024, Lall was the Alan and Carol Silberstein Professor of Engineering at Columbia University. He served as founding director of the Columbia Water Center. Lall studies how to solve water scarcity and how to predict and mitigate floods. In 2014, he was awarded the Henry Darcy Medal by the European Geosciences Union. He was named an American Geophysical Union Fellow in 2017 and their Walter Langbein Lecturer in 2022. He was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2018, and has received the Arid Lands Hydrology and the Ven Te Chow Awards from the American Society of Civil Engineers. In April 2021 he was named to the “Hot List of the world’s 1,000 top climate scientists” by Reuters.
Richard M. Vogel is an American hydrologist and environmental engineer and professor emeritus in the department of civil and environmental engineering at Tufts University.
