What is really undermining hydrologic science today?

• Published in: Hydrological processes Vol. 21; no. 20; pp. 2819 - 2822
• Main Authors: Andréassian, Vazken, Lerat, Julien, Loumagne, Cécile, Mathevet, Thibault, Michel, Claude, Oudin, Ludovic, Perrin, Charles
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Chichester, UK John Wiley & Sons, Ltd 30-09-2007; Wiley
• Subjects: Environmental Sciences
• ISSN: 0885-6087; 1099-1085
• DOI: 10.1002/hyp.6854

In a commentary published in Hydrological Processes, Beven revealed that he had been accused by some members of the hydrological community of undermining the reputation of hydrologic science among model end-users. One of the reasons for this accusation was that the GLUE methodology which he introduced in 1992 and which has since received much attention is considered by some of our colleagues to provide overestimated error bounds for streamflow simulations. Since he called on the hydrologic community to contribute to the debate concerning the reasonable or unreasonable character of this charge, we contribute in this paper our viewpoint on the following two questions: 1.Does the GLUE methodology overestimate the uncertainty of model simulations? 2.What is in fact undermining hydrologic science? In our view, the most likely factors undermining the reputation of our science among our end-users are (i) overselling the performance of hydrological models and (ii) focusing on catchment-specific solutions rather than generic solutions.