On-line Handbook of Hydrologic Measurement Methods

CUAHSI is developing a handbook of hydrologic measurement methods that can be accessed from the Internet. The handbook will help to fill a significant gap in the hydrologic sciences measurement literature by serving as a comprehensive, Web-enabled, full-text searchable, peer-reviewed reference for hydrologic measurement methods. The handbook will contain detailed instructions for making hydrologic measurements using traditional as well as new and emerging approaches. All of the methods will be downloadable in HTML and PDF formats. We envision that the handbook will be useful to investigators from a wide variety of disciplines (e.g., hydrology, water resources, agronomy, agriculture, geology, geophysics, geochemistry, biology, and biogeophysics) working in a variety of settings including private consulting, government, and academia. To see a draft of the table of contents of the Handbook, please go to the Draft Table of Contents page.

The advantage of publishing the handbook as an electronic book is that it can evolve over time and be updated and improved. As new methods are developed they will be published along side earlier versions so that investigators will be aware of all the possible accepted measurement techniques for a given hydrologic variable. One section of the handbook will be devoted to emerging methods where contributors can post preliminary methods that have not yet undergone peer-review.

Current Activities

We are currently exploring the idea of publishing methods papers in a special section of a major hydrologic sciences journal. To that end, we have submitted a proposal to Water Resources Research for consideration. If our proposal is accepted, we will then widely solicit foundation papers (i.e., articles that summarize the state-of-the-art in various areas) as well as papers describing new and emerging hydrologic measurement methods for publication in the special section. Once published, these articles will be linked to the Table of Contents on the Handbook’s Web page, which is also now being developed.

For additional information on the Handbook. please contact Ty Ferre at ty@hwr.arizona.edu.