Peter S. Eagleson

Last updated
Peter S. Eagleson
Born(1928-02-27)February 27, 1928
DiedJanuary 6, 2021(2021-01-06) (aged 92)
NationalityAmerican
Alma materB.S. 1949, M.S. 1952, Lehigh University
Sc.D. 1956, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Known forIntegrating hydrology and ecology to redefine hydrology
Scientific career
Fields Hydrology, Environmental Engineering
Doctoral advisor Arthur T. Ippen
Doctoral students Dara Entekhabi

Peter S. Eagleson (27 February 1928 - 6 January 2021) was an American hydrologist, author of Dynamic Hydrology and Ecohydrology: Darwinian Expression of Vegetation Form and Function. He taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1952 and was a Professor Emeritus. He held professional positions including member of the National Academy of Engineering (since 1982) and President of the American Geophysical Union from 1986-1988. He won many awards including the Stockholm International Water Institute's World Water Prize in 1997.

Contents

Early life

Peter was born in 1928 in Philadelphia to Helen (née Sturges) and William Boal Eagleson and attended Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. [1] [2] At Lehigh he overlapped with his older brother, Bill, and was called for active duty with the US Army Corps of Engineers following graduation in 1949. He later returned to Lehigh for a master's degree in engineering, focused on hydraulics, and was recruited there by Arthur Ippen to join MIT's new hydrodynamics laboratory [1] (now the Parsons Laboratory for Environmental Science and Engineering). He joined the MIT faculty as an instructor in 1954, became an assistant professor in 1955, and completed his Sc.D. a year later in 1956 with a dissertation on shoaling waves. [3]

Career

Eagleson's research interests include dynamic hydrology, hydroclimatology, and forest ecology. [4] His early research was on sediment transport and wave theory. He published multiple articles and book chapters about these subjects. [5] It was not until 1964 that he significantly narrowed his focus to hydrology. In 1978 Eagleson published seven papers on climate, soil, and vegetation in a single issue of Water Resources Research, decades prior to the emergence of the field of ecohydrology. [2] [6] These papers immediately impacted the field of hydrology. [5]

Eagleson chaired the 1991 National Research Council committee that published the Opportunities in Hydrological Sciences report, which established hydrology as a critical pillar of geoscience and Earth system science and led to the creation of the National Science Foundation’s Hydrologic Sciences Program. [2]

Eagleson taught at MIT since 1952, holding a chair as Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering since 1965. [7]

The Peter S. Eagleson Lecture in Hydrological Sciences was established by the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Sciences in 2008 in his honor. [2]

Awards

Selected publications

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hydrology</span> Science of the movement, distribution, and quality of water on Earth

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Evapotranspiration</span> Natural processes of water movement within the water cycle

Evapotranspiration (ET) refers to the combined processes which move water from the Earth's surface into the atmosphere. It covers both water evaporation and transpiration. Evapotranspiration is an important part of the local water cycle and climate, and measurement of it plays a key role in water resource management agricultural irrigation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ecohydrology</span>

Ecohydrology is an interdisciplinary scientific field studying the interactions between water and ecological systems. It is considered a sub discipline of hydrology, with an ecological focus. These interactions may take place within water bodies, such as rivers and lakes, or on land, in forests, deserts, and other terrestrial ecosystems. Areas of research in ecohydrology include transpiration and plant water use, adaption of organisms to their water environment, influence of vegetation and benthic plants on stream flow and function, and feedbacks between ecological processes, the soil carbon sponge and the hydrological cycle.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Interception (water)</span> Precipitation that is intercepted by vegetation before reaching the soil

Interception refers to precipitation that does not reach the soil, but is instead intercepted by the leaves, branches of plants and the forest floor. It occurs in the canopy, and in the forest floor or litter layer. Because of evaporation, interception of liquid water generally leads to loss of that precipitation for the drainage basin, except for cases such as fog interception, but increase flood protection dramatically, Alila et al., (2009).

In hydrology, moisture recycling or precipitation recycling refer to the process by which a portion of the precipitated water that evapotranspired from a given area contributes to the precipitation over the same area. Moisture recycling is thus a component of the hydrologic cycle. The ratio of the locally derived precipitation to total precipitation is known as the recycling ratio, ρ:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rafael L. Bras</span> Puerto Rican civil engineer

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Groundwater recharge</span> Groundwater that recharges an aquifer

Groundwater recharge or deep drainage or deep percolation is a hydrologic process, where water moves downward from surface water to groundwater. Recharge is the primary method through which water enters an aquifer. This process usually occurs in the vadose zone below plant roots and is often expressed as a flux to the water table surface. Groundwater recharge also encompasses water moving away from the water table farther into the saturated zone. Recharge occurs both naturally and through anthropogenic processes, where rainwater and/or reclaimed water is routed to the subsurface.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hydrological model</span> Predicting and managing water resources

A hydrologic model is a simplification of a real-world system that aids in understanding, predicting, and managing water resources. Both the flow and quality of water are commonly studied using hydrologic models.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dynamic global vegetation model</span> Computer vegetation model

A Dynamic Global Vegetation Model (DGVM) is a computer program that simulates shifts in potential vegetation and its associated biogeochemical and hydrological cycles as a response to shifts in climate. DGVMs use time series of climate data and, given constraints of latitude, topography, and soil characteristics, simulate monthly or daily dynamics of ecosystem processes. DGVMs are used most often to simulate the effects of future climate change on natural vegetation and its carbon and water cycles.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to hydrology:

The global freshwater model WaterGAP calculates flows and storages of water on all continents of the globe, taking into account the human influence on the natural freshwater system by water abstractions and dams. It supports understanding the freshwater situation across the world's river basins during the 20th and the 21st centuries, and is applied to assess water scarcity, droughts and floods and to quantify the impact of human actions on e.g. groundwater, wetlands, streamflow and sea-level rise. Modelling results of WaterGAP have contributed to international assessment of the global environmental situation including the UN World Water Development Reports, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the UN Global Environmental Outlooks as well as to reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. WaterGAP contributes to the Intersectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project ISIMIP, where consistent ensembles of model runs by a number of global hydrological models are generated to assess the impact of climate change and other anthropogenic stressors on freshwater resources world-wide.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Saeid Eslamian</span> Iranian academic

Saeid Eslamian is a full professor of Resilient Climate and Water Systems at Isfahan University of Technology in the Department of Water Science and Engineering. His research focuses mainly on statistical and environmental hydrology and climate change. In particular, he is working on forecasting natural hazards including flood, drought, storm, wind, pollution toward a sustainable environment. He is now the Director of Excellence in risk management and natural hazards. Formerly, he was a visiting professor at Princeton University, United States, university of ETH Zurich, Switzerland and McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He has contributed to more than 600 publications in journals, books, or as technical reports. He is the founder and chief editor of International Journal of Hydrology Science and Technology. Currently, he has been the author of about 210 books and book chapters. Eslamian is the editorial board member and reviewer of about 100 Web of Science (ISI) Journals. Saeid is the editor of Journal of Hydrology (Elsevier)Journal of Hydrology, Ecohydrology and Hydrobiology (Elsevier), Journal of the Saudi Society of Agricultural Sciences (Elsevier), Journal of Water Reuse and Desalination (IWA).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Murugesu Sivapalan</span> Sri Lankan Tamil hydrologist

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.

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.

Petra Döll is a German hydrologist whose research focuses on global water resources and methods for transdisciplinary knowledge integration. She is a professor of hydrology at the Institute of Physical Geography, Goethe University Frankfurt.

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Giuliano Di Baldassarre</span> Italian academic

Giuliano Di Baldassarre is a professor of hydrology at Uppsala University and the Director of the Centre of Natural Hazards and Disaster Science, Sweden. He was awarded the American Geophysical Union Whiterspoon Lecture in 2020 and the European Geosciences Union Plinius Medal in 2021.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paweł Rowiński</span> Polish hydrogeologist

Paweł Mariusz Rowiński (born 26 February 1965) is a Polish hydrogeologist, hydrodynamicist, geophysicist, full professor at the Institute of Geophysics, Polish Academy of Sciences, a full member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, vice-president of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Upmanu Lall</span> American Earth Scientist

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ezio Todini</span> Italian academic

Ezio Todini is an Italian academic, hydrologist and civil engineer.

References

  1. 1 2 "Remembering William and Peter Eagleson: A Tale of Two Brothers". Lehigh University --Lehigh News. Lehigh University. Retrieved 25 July 2024.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 Entekhabi, Dara. "PETER S. EAGLESON 1928-2021". Memorial Tributes: National Academy of Engineering, Volume 25. National Academy of Engineering. Retrieved 26 July 2024.
  3. Eagleson, Peter (1956). The movement of discrete particles on a plane beach due to shoaling waves. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. p. 131. Retrieved 25 July 2024.
  4. "MIT - Faculty - Peter Eagleson | Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, MIT". cee.mit.edu. Retrieved 2016-08-11.
  5. 1 2 Rodriguez-Iturbe, Ignacio; Eagleson, Peter S. (1989-01-24). "1988 Horton Medal presented to Peter S. Eagleson". Eos, Transactions American Geophysical Union. 70 (4): 57–58. Bibcode:1989EOSTr..70...57R. doi:10.1029/89EO00035. ISSN   2324-9250.
  6. Ivanov, Valeriy. "Ecohydrology". Oxford Bibliographies. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 26 July 2024.
  7. "Eagleson, Peter S. | MIT Center for Global Change Science". cgcs.mit.edu. Retrieved 2016-08-11.
  8. "James R. Killian Lecture Series". web.mit.edu. Retrieved 2016-08-11.
  9. "P.E. Eagleson". iahs.info. Retrieved 2016-08-11.