A symposium will be held at the Cornell University campus May 14-15, 2012. The focus of the meeting covers a range of topics in current hydrologic sciences (Turbulence in ABL, atmospheric radiation, evaporation, erosion, open channels, instability and fluid mechanics; infiltration, Boussinesq and runoff relationships, and hysteresis and thermodynamics) suggested by two leaders in the field , Wilfried Brutsaert and Yves Parlange. The symposium will include 30 students as well as videotaping of presentations and planning for a special issue of Water Resources Research. The gathering of individuals around these research themes represents a solid research contribution to advance the state of the field.
Though the essence of the scientific pursuit is finding unaffiliated truths, scientific advancement fundamentally stems from the insights and efforts of individuals. This dichotomy can obscure exemplars for young scholars of how to contribute to scientific understanding. The symposium held on May 14 and 15, 2012 at the Cornell campus addressed this dichotomy by highlighting the eminently successful strategies for advancement of the science of hydrology by exploring the ramifications of the work from Drs. Wilfried Brutsaert and Jean-Yves Parlange. These two scientists made many of the most significant contributions to the understanding of hydrologic processes of the last 50 years. During this symposium, entitled "New Advances in the Ecological Hydrosphere," a group of nearly 100 hydrologists met. They ranged in age from graduate students to recently and not-so-recently retired, but still active, university faculty from all five continents. The caliber was top rate. Some of the young scientists that were invited were subsidized with NSF funds from this grant. The meetings were intentionally informal in order to facilitate the discussion between the different generations of scientists. The well-illustrated oral talks and slide presentations can be downloaded via the Cornell library website using http://hdl.handle.net/1813/29552. Based on the posters and talks during the symposium, presenters and other scientists published 25 papers in a special section in Water Resources Research entitled: "Discovery Through Physical Analysis Honoring the Scientific Legacies of W. Brutsaert and J.-Y. Parlange." Editors of this special section were Selker, Sander and Kumar. The papers in the special issue can be viewed and downloaded from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1002/(ISSN)1944-7973/specialsection/HDPTPA1.
