People ›Faculty

Prof. Günter Blöschl

Responsibilities

Prof. Blöschl is Head of the Institute of Hydraulic Engineering and Water Resources Management, Director of the Centre for Water Resource Systems of the Vienna University of Technology as well as Chair of the Vienna Doctoral Programme on Water Resource Systems. He is currently teaching courses on Engineering Hydrology, Risk Assessment, Modelling and Simulation, Integrated Water Resources Analyses, and Water Resources Management and Planning (see TU Vienna Courses).

Research Interests

• Flood hydrology, flood processes, flood estimation and forecasting, climate change and floods.

• Catchment hydrology including scale issues, flow and transport processes, floods and droughts, soil moisture, snow, and hydrological measurements.

• Hydrological simulation and modelling, runoff models, spatially distributed hydrological models and stochastic methods.

• Water resources management: risk analysis, uncertainty assessment, climate change impacts, hydrologic change, and socio-hydrology.

• Regional estimation, predictions in ungauged basins, geostatistical methods and Geographic Information Systems. 

Projects he is currently leading or has recently finished include (a) Projects on floods: An Advanced Grant of the European Research Council on Deciphering River Flood Change, the HORA 3.0 project where flood risk is mapped for 30000 km of Austrian streams (see www.hochwasserrisiko.at), an evaluation of flood retention measures on the flood peak reduction at the Inn river, developing large-scale systems approaches to flood risk assessment and management; (b) Projects related to water resources and climate: Development of climate change adaptation strategies for water resources management in Austria, low flows and climate change, and development of coupled models of the human-water system (socio-hydro coupling) for strategic water resources planning in Germany; (c) Projects on runoff processes: Exploring the link between surface runoff and spring dynamics in the headwater catchments of the Vienna water supply system, developing a new framework for runoff process modelling, and the Hydrology Open Air Laboratory (HOAL) in the Petzenkirchen catchment, which is a synthesis activity in the Vienna Doctoral Programme on Water Resource Systems where detailed field observations of water fluxes and water quality parameters are performed (see HOAL). 

Key Facts

Günter Blöschl graduated from the Vienna University of Technology. His international experience includes appointments as a research fellow in Vancouver, Canberra and Melbourne. In 2007 he was appointed Chair of Hydrology and Water Resources Management at the Vienna University of Technology.

Günter Blöschl has published around 400 scientific articles in the area of hydrology and water resources. About 200 of these articles appeared in international peer reviewed journals listed in the ISI citation index. His publications have been cited more than 11000 times as per the ISI data base, and his h-index is 61. He is currently Editor of Hydrology and Earth Systems Sciences, and Associate Editor or Editorial Board member of the Journal of Hydrology and Hydromechanics, the International Journal of River Basin Management, Hydrology Research, Österreichische Wasser- und Abfallwirtschaft, and Hydrologie und Wasserbewirtschaftung. 

He has received numerous honours during his career including election as a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, the German Academy of Science and Engineering (acatech) and the International Water Academy. He is a corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, a foreign member of the Bologna Academy of Sciences, and a distinguished visiting professor at the Tsinghua University, Beijing. He has been awarded an Advanced Grant of the European Research Council (ERC), the Helmholtz International Fellow Award, the International Hydrology Prize of UNESCO, WMO, IAHS, and the Robert E. Horton Medal of the American Geophysical Union. 

Günter Blöschl chairs the Scientific Advisory Council of the German Federal Institute of Hydrology (BfG), and has been the chair of the Predictions in Ungauged Basins (PUB) initiative of the International Association Hydrological Sciences whose Synthesis book he has edited. From 2013-2015 he was the President of the European Geosciences Union. From 2017-2021 he is the President of the International Association of Hydrological Sciences.