PRAGWATER

This year’s General Assembly of the European Geosciences Union included, for the first time, a session on the role and value of ‘prediction’ in hydrological sciences. The session took place on Monday, April 23rd and was attended by approx. 125 EGU2012-visitors. The room was filled well over capacity and unfortunately, some people were unable to attend as a result.

Six speakers elaborated on the theme of using hydrological predictions on different time-scales and for different types of decision. Ana Lopez reminded attendees that any prediction of future climate, either single-valued or probabilistic, is a product of a set of underlying assumptions and may be flawed as a result of those being incomplete or incorrect. Robust policy-making must therefore take these uncertainties into account. Jos Timmermans described the challenge of combining the presence of both scientific uncertainty and dynamic complexity in predictive modeling as well as an approach for doing this…