Vogel and Read recognized for paper

Richard Vogel, professor emeritus in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Laura Read, EG16, were selected by the International Commission on Statistical Hydrology of the International Association of Hydrological Sciences (ICSH-IAHS) to receive the 2019 STAHY Best Paper Award. Vogel and Read will receive the award at the 2019 STAHY International Workshop in Nanjing, China.

Their paper “Reliability, return periods, and risk under nonstationarity” seeks to initiate a discussion on how engineers can better communicate the failure risk of a water resource design to communities situated within a floodplain. Vogel and Read provide evidence for the need to replace the use of average return period, or the likelihood of a flood occurring based on historical data, with the concept of reliability, or how likely a system is to fail, as a metric for designing and communicating water resource design.

Vogel and Read’s work serves as a platform for future research into hydrologic design in response to climate change and naturally shifting water resources. Their work continues an important conversation around risk-based decision making and offers new tools for characterizing complex probability distributions in water resource design.

The award consists of an IAHS certificate and financial support to present an invited lecture during the annual ICSH workshop on October 19, 2019.