IHD Bulletin: No. 6

Abstract

The U. S. National Committee for the International Hydrological Decade has recommended that a national roster of hydrologists be prepared as a contribution to the profession. This proposal immediately raises the question, ‘What is a hydrologist?’ And, back one step, the more fundamental question, ‘What is hydrology?’About three years ago, the Civil Service Commission defined the terms hydrologist and hydrology as follows: A hydrologist is a scientist who studies the waters of the Earth—their occurrence, circulation, and distribution, their chemical and physical properties, and their reaction with their environment, including their relation to living things. Hydrology is a relatively new but major interdisciplinary science related to a number of more traditional fields, including geology, civil engineering, chemistry, meteorology, biology, agronomy, forestry, and geography. For the hydrologist, the fact that hydrology embraces the full life cycle of water on the Earth is the important unifying concept. The hydrologist studies water on the surface of the land, in the soil and underlying rocks, and in the atmosphere—particularly with respect to evaporation and precipitation of water in the hydrological cycle.