Prof. Günter Blöschl
Responsibilities
Prof. Blöschl is head of the department of Hydrology and Water Resources Management at the Institute for Hydraulic and Water Resources Engineering of the Vienna University of Technology. He has taught, or has been involved in teaching, numerous courses on subjects related to hydrology and water resources systems. These include courses at the Vienna University of Technology and postgraduate courses in Zurich and Karlsruhe. He has supervised and/or examined 10 Master students and 10 PhD students in 8 countries and has reviewed 2 habilitation theses.
Teaching: Engineering hydrology, Statistical methods for civil engineers
Research interests
• Hydrologic simulation and modelling, runoff models, spatially distributed hydrologic models and macroscale models.
• Catchment hydrology including scale issues, physical processes in hydrology, spatial processes and patterns, soil moisture, snow hydrology and hydrologic measurements.
• Water resources management: risk analysis, flood forecasting, uncertainty assessment and climate change impacts.
• Regional flood estimation, geostatistical methods and Geographic Information Systems.
The research interests of Günter Blöschl are in hydrology and water resource systems. His research has contributed to fundamental issues including spatially distributed modelling and simulation, the issue of scale and scaling, and estimation in the absence of data. He has also made contributions to practical problems of civil engineering such as design flood estimation for hydraulic structures, hydrological forecasts and flood risk for clients from the industry. Two of the projects he has recently led are of high political relevance - the HORA project where flood risk was mapped for 26000 km of Austrian streams (see www.hochwasserrisiko.at) and the development of the Kamp flood forecasting system which is currently operationally used by the state government and the hydropower operator. He is currently principal investigator of three EC projects, the AWARE, HYDRATE and ERA-NET Crue projects, which deal with water balance modelling, flood estimation and flood mitigation, respectively.
Key Facts
Günter Blöschl has published 207 full papers which include 82 reviewed journal articles, 24 invited book chapters, books and special journal issues, and 101 papers in conference proceedings. Additionally, he has published 184 abstracts and 64 reports. His publications have been cited more than 1200 times as per the ISI data base, and the H-index is 20. He is or has been an Editor or Associate Editor of eleven major international journals in the field (eEarth, Encyclopedia of Hydrological Sciences, Environmental Modelling and Software, Hydrological Processes, Hydrologie und Wasserbewirtschaftung, Hydrology and Earth Systems Sciences, Hydrology Research, International Journal of River Basin Management, Journal of Hydrology, Nordic Hydrology (past), Water Resources Research (past)). He is also an Associate Editor of the Newsletter of the European Geosciences Union and of the Austrian Water and Waste Management Journal.
He has been invited to deliver plenary and keynote addresses at international conferences (104 invitations in 23 countries during 1997 - 2007), and received awards in different countries including life membership of the International Water Academy and election as a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union (FAGU) for recognised international eminence in hydrology and water resources modelling. He is a referee for scientific journals (400 reviews for 28 journals in the water resources area) and research foundations and universities (referee for 33 of them) in a total of 12 countries. He has been a convenor of 39 workshops and symposia, mostly as a part of larger international conferences and has been invited to serve on the international scientific advisory committees of 18 international conferences.
He is President for Water Resources Systems of the International Association of Hydrological Sciences, Chair of the UNESCO Working group on climate and land use impacts on flooding, Chair of the Predictions in Ungauged Basins initiative of the International Association of Hydrological Sciences and Past President of the Hydrology Division of the European Geosciences Union which attracts more than 1000 hydrologists at their annual meetings. Günter Blöschl is a member of the scientific advisory council of the GeoForschungsZentrum Potsdam (GFZ), German's largest research institution in the geosciences.
His international experience includes appointments as a research fellow in Vancouver (1989), and as a visiting fellow in Canberra (1992 - 1994) and Melbourne (1993, 1997). In 2007 he was appointed Chair of Hydrology and Water Resources Management at the Vienna University of Technology.
Contact
Univ.Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Dr.techn. Günter Blöschl
E-mail: bloeschl@hydro.tuwien.ac.at
Tel.: +43-1-58801-22315
Fax: +43-1-58801-22399
Centre for Water Resource Systems (CWRS)
Institute of Hydraulic Engineering and Water Resources Management
Vienna University of Technology
Karlsplatz 13/222, A-1040 Vienna, Austria
Vienna Doctoral Programme on Water Resource Systems, Vienna University of Technology