Data vital to decision making, Hydroinformatics Professor Ioana Popescu says at her inauguration
Hydroinformatics presents a fascinating intersection of hydrology, computer science, and data analytics, offering boundless opportunities to address pressing water-related challenges facing our world today. It helps decision makers to understand these challenges, as ultimately they are the ones to make the decisions, Ioana Popescu said at her inauguration as Professor of Hydroinformatics.
The 5 April ceremony inaugurated Popescu as professor at IHE Delft and Delft University of Technology. Her career, which brought her to IHE Delft in 2001, has spanned projects and universities across the world in Europe, Asia, Africa, and North, Middle and South America. She is the first IHE Delft alumna to become a professor at the same Institute: she earned her MSc in Hydraulic Engineering, specialisation River Engineering and River Basin Development, in 1997.
“Although hydroinformatics can assess future scenarios based on the available data from in-situ monitoring stations, open source satellite data, or artificial intelligence recomputed data, it will never replace the decision makers,” Popescu said in her inaugural lecture. “What it can do, however, is support decision making by setting out possible scenarios.”
“Although hydroinformatics can assess future scenarios, it will never replace the decision makers.”
Watch the interview with Ioana Popescu
Information gap
The effects of climate change increasingly mean that “water is at the wrong place, in the wrong quantity at the wrong time,” Popescu said, adding that this underlines the increasing need for research in this field, along with collecting more data in different formats and different sources than before.
In some areas, there is ample data available via open source, satellite data and citizen science collected data, but in others, due to lack of in-situ monitoring stations, there is data scarcity.
This gap in information needs to be addressed to reduce vulnerability and build up resilience, Popescu said, particularly, interest has grown for research to understand climate change influences on the magnitude and frequency of floods and on droughts. Research needs to consider a system approach for climate change adaptation, looking at issues related to uncertainty in modelling, how decision support systems can help climate change, such that robust decisions can be taken. However, there are issues with the fact that past records can no longer be relied upon. She added that nature-based solutions can mitigate the worst effects of drought, but not prevent them altogether.
Digital twins
Hydroinformatics as a field is growing in importance due to the challenges posed by climate change, Popescu said: “The future of hydroinformatics at IHE Delft will be in developing frameworks for fully operational digital twins of rivers and their catchment or urban areas. Take, for example, a catchment as a unit of a water system, such models and digital twins will need to be developed in bespoke form, as each catchment is unique and has its own particularities. These inevitably refer to methodologies and tools that need to be worked out within the context of the particular application area of water resources.” She added that research on hydroinformatics needs to be mirrored in the education related to this topic.
She also reflected how she drew inspiration from her hometown Timisoara in Romania, which is protected by the same system for both floods and droughts by engineering works from the 18th century. “The system was initially built to protect the city from floods, but the design proved equally suitable to protect the city from droughts, which shows that a good design can serve a purpose beyond the one initially envisaged.”
Pioneers of hydroinformatics
In a speech after the ceremony Roland Price, Emeritus Professor of Hydroinformatics and former head of hydroinfomatics at IHE Delft, noted that artificial intelligence, though a hot topic, by no means is a new concept:
“It has been used in hydroinformatics since the science began 30 years ago, pioneered by the first hydroinformatics head of department, the late Mike Abbott,” he said.
Mapping hydroinformatics on the artificial intelligence and digital innovation landscape
Watch Popescu's inaugural seminar.
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