The improvements over the last 50 years have been impressive, and hydrometeorological centers are continuously adopting modern technologies to provide more reliable weather and climate information for societal needs. Indeed, the technology boom and the vast amount of radar and satellite observations have enabled many national hydrometeorological centers to become hubs of information and research in the field of weather forecasting for governments, policymakers, and private agencies. Nowadays, hydrometeorologists incorporate remotely sensed data from radars and satellites into numerical models to estimate hydrologic variables such as rainfall, evapotranspiration, soil moisture, and vegetation dynamics over large-scale domains. With the advent of satellites and radars, hydrometeorology has changed from a “data poor” to a “data rich” environment. Fortunately, TV networks and websites have provided timely information on the weather and climate forecast. A better knowledge of hydrometeorology along with the enhanced computational capabilities allowed them to forecast hydrometeorological variables more accurately. Governmental and private agencies have begun hiring hydrologists to use meteorological data and improve the accuracy of hydrometeorological predictions. Since then, our understanding of hydrometeorology has advanced considerably, especially with the significant growth of technology in the second half of the 20th century (e.g., introduction of televisions in the early 1950s and computers in the 1970s).įrom the 1980s up to now, tremendous advances have been made in the hydrometeorological science. Hydrometeorological records started in ca 3000 BC mainly by observing the movement of moon and stars. Climatologists focus on seasonal to decadal scales, while hydrometeorologists are more interested in studying short time-scale events (i.e., hours up to a few days) such as severe storms and flash floods. In hydrometeorology, meteorological data are incorporated into hydrological models to predict water and energy exchanges between the land surface and atmosphere, weather, climate, and natural hazards such as wildland fires, storms, droughts, and floods. Hydrometeorology has evolved as a special discipline of both meteorology and hydrology, linking the fundamental knowledge of meteorologists with the needs of hydrologists to assess the water and energy cycles at local, regional, and global scales. In general, hydrometeorology deals with monitoring the energy and water fluxes between the atmosphere and earth. *Address all correspondence to: Introduction Union of Hellenic Water Supply and Sewerage Operators, Greece.HAO-Demeter, Agricultural Research Institution of Crete, Greece.Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, USA.Viterbi School of Engineering, University of Southern California, USA.Center of Excellence for Climate Change Research/Department of Meteorology, King Abdulaziz University, Saudi Arabia.Department of Civil Engineering, University of Thessaly, Greece.Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Water Resources Research Center, University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA.In particular, we discuss the role of hydrometeorological records, observations, and modeling in assessing the amplitude and time-scale for climate change and global warming. We provide herein a synthetic review of advances in hydrometeorological observations from their infancy to today. Numerical models have been developed to forecast hydrometeorological phenomena in short-, medium- and long-term horizons, ranging from hourly to annual timescales. Today, the ambiguities in hydrometeorological observations have significantly improved due to the advances in monitoring, modeling, and forecasting of processes related to the land-atmosphere coupling and forcing. Reviewing these observations in the light of our modern knowledge of the dynamic of atmospheres is critical as it can reduce the ambiguities associated to understanding major fluctuations or evolutions in the earth climate. Historical records suggest that the first hydrometeorological observations date back to ca 3500 BC. Accurate hydrometeorological records and observations with different timelines are crucial to assess climate evolution and weather forecast. Hydrometeorology aims at measuring and understanding the physics, chemistry, energy and water fluxes of the atmosphere, and their coupling with the earth surface environmental parameters.
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