Hydrology Newsletter

Dear reader, I hope you are doing well and finding time to stay curious about water, climate, and our changing environment. As June 2026 draws to a close, I wanted to briefly share what policymakers, researchers, and practitioners across the world are talking about in the water resources domain, and how these conversations connect to our ongoing discussions in HydroGeek. This month, there has been renewed attention on climate-linked extremes and the need for more adaptive and holistic water management, especially in vulnerable regions facing floods, droughts, and water quality degradation. Editorials and policy notes emphasize integrated approaches that combine hydrological modelling, nature-based solutions, and better governance to deal with compound risks rather than treating floods, scarcity, and pollution as separate problems. These themes resonate strongly with our regular focus on watershed-scale planning, GIS-supported assessment, and multi-criteria decision making for priorit...

1.TOPSIS is best described as A single-objective optimization method for continuous design variables A compensatory MCDM method for ranking finite alternatives across multiple criteria A simulation technique for stochastic hydrologic models A clustering algorithm for grouping similar alternatives 2.In TOPSIS, the Positive Ideal Solution (PIS) represents The alternative with the smallest Euclidean norm in the decision space A hypothetical alternative with the best performance on every criterion The real alternative that appears first in the decision matrix The average of all alternatives over all criteria 3.The Negative Ideal Solution (NIS) in TOPSIS is The worst-performing actual alternative in the dataset A hypothetical alternative with the worst value of each criterion The alternative with the largest index in the matrix The alternative that violates the most constraints 4.For benefit-type criteria (to be maximized), the PIS component is taken as The minimum observed val...

I hope this message finds you well. I am pleased to invite you to enroll in my new 12-part online e-course: “Learn Multi Criteria Decision Making Techniques – with Real Life Case Studies.” This e-course is designed for postgraduate engineering and management students, research scholars, and early-career professionals who wish to apply Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) methods rigorously in academic research, consulting, and real-world decision problems. Across 12 focused modules, we will: Build a clear conceptual foundation of major MCDM techniques Work through complete, real-life case studies step by step Use real datasets relevant to engineering, environment, and management problems Demonstrate method implementation in a transparent and reproducible way Discuss how to write and present MCDM-based results in theses and research papers By the end of the course, you will be able to: Choose appropriate MCDM techniques for ...

Why Hydroinformatics — and Why Now India is facing a water crisis of compounding proportions. Erratic monsoons, receding groundwater tables, increasingly severe floods, and the pressures of rapid urbanisation have made water resource management one of the most urgent engineering challenges of our time. At the same time, the arrival of machine learning, big data, IoT sensor networks, and geospatial intelligence has created an entirely new toolkit for tackling these problems — if only enough engineers know how to use it. That is the promise of Hydroinformatics Engineering: a discipline that fuses hydrological science with the power of modern computation, data science, and artificial intelligence to model, predict, and manage water systems with a precision that was simply not possible a decade ago. NIT Agartala, an Institute of National Importance under the Government of India, has launched a 2-year full-time M.Tech programme in Hydroinformatics Engineering to train exactly these speciali...