23.08.2016: Dr. Ingo Heidbüchel, GFZ section Hydrology, is co-author of a study that is awarded with the MG Anderson Outstanding Paper of the Year Award 2016. The MG Anderson Award of the scientific journal Hydrological Processes honors“outstanding papers on hydrological processes”.

The international team of authors – besides Ingo Heidbüchel scientists from the Netherlands, Sweden and the United States are involved in the study – deals with new methods on the determination of transport processes of water in river catchments. By using hydrological models the scientists test the role of mixing assumptions for the determination of the temporal and spatial distribution of water.

Within a landscape water from rainfall events mixes with the already existing water. The scientists were able to show that the assumptions on the mixing behavior used within a hydrological model have an immense impact on the modelling results. To produce reliable results on spatial and temporal transport processes it therefore is a prerequisite to determine which mixing assumptions are valid in the research area. This can be achieved by characterizing important factors within the research area for example in the form of soil properties and storage capacities before modeling.

The MG Anderson Award is named after Malcom Anderson, founder of the scientific journal Hydrological Processes, published by the specialist printer Wiley. (ak)

Velde, Y., Heidbüchel, I., Lyon, S. W., Nyberg, L., Rodhe, A., Bishop, K., & Troch, P. A. 2015. Consequences of mixing assumptions for time‐variable travel time distributions. Hydrological Processes, 29(16), 3460-3474.

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