The American Institute of Hydrology is on a new course at new location, and in four-month’s time, I will turn over the presidency to Dr. Miquel Medina. The course I have been driven to make has been one of significant change and has taken considerable commitment on the part of the Executive Committee.

As you should all be aware by now, an agreement was signed on January 2008 with Southern Illinois University for an office that is located on their campus. Professor Rolando Bravo, a certified professional Hydrologist (PH) with AIH since 1994 and our past Chairman for the Board of Registration, has become the Executive Director of the administrative office. Dr. Bravo is a Professor with the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department of the University, teaching classes in areas of Hydrology and Hydraulics. He is also Licensed Professional Engineer and a Diplomat in Water Resources Engineering with professional experience in USA and South America.

We look forward to improved management through our new Executive Director and a gratifying relation with Southern Illinois University that will lead to a renewed period of growth and stimulation for our Institute. We have received very warm welcomes from the Dean of the College of Engineering and the Chair of the Civil Engineering Department. Our transition was not as smooth as anticipated, not all of our files were transferred and we were not given ownership of the www.aihydrol.org registry name. Most everything is now running smoothly.

AIH has never been a large organization, never surpassing the millennium membership mark at our peak, and we are now even smaller with recent losses from our charter membership period. We are an organization of less than 500 professional members. Our membership must increase and our certification must have better recognition. The two are not mutually exclusive.

I believe that the certification of hydrology professionals and hydrologic technicians is a commendable goal, and that the ultimate recognition of hydrology by States in the licensing of professionals is necessary for all water-resources and ecological planning. I do not believe that the American Institute of Hydrology has exclusive rights to hydrology certification but that we should be among the leaders in determining what constitutes certification and registration in the field of hydrology.

Because we have tended to limit our membership to an exclusively-qualified applicant, we have restricted ourselves to slow growth, and in past years to negative growth. We are beginning to turn this around, but the gains are imperceptible. What is needed is more interaction with other societies, agencies, and the public, so that they learn more about what it is we offer and where we are going.

So, what do we offer and where are we going?

The goals of AIH are simple - to define hydrology, certify hydrology professionals (and now technicians), and to provide education in hydrology. We have been strong in the definition process, but lag in both certification and education. Certification lags because membership lags. Education is almost non existent and thus membership lags and certification is a relative unknown.

Membership: Membership has been restricted to hydrology professionals with rigid academic standards. Candidates find our application forms inconvenient. We have recently opened our associate membership up to those with just an interest in hydrology and some minimum education requirements. We are in the process of revising our applications to be more applicant-friendly, and we are working towards on-line applications, registrations, billing etc.

We have opened membership and certification up to hydrologic technicians because it is a natural extension to professional certification and to the support of hydrology as a meaningful science. Public agencies and industry are concerned about the way data are collected with respect to standards and usability. They desire some way to define the competence of those employees that collect the data used in water-resource decision making.

Certification: This is our most important product and we need to convey the importance of certification in hydrology to others. Most professionals working in water-related fields will dismiss the need for certification in hydrology. It is the opinion of many that hydrology certification is of no value in terms of their income, career, or education. The most important value that they ignore is the value implied to the resource itself. Certification can most importantly benefit water resources. It puts an onus on those practicing to have certain required hydrologic knowledge in order to provide study results for decision-making in water resources. Certification can benefit income – professional hydrology certification is recognition of knowledge and level of knowledge by peers. A greater knowledge of water science is being demanded by authorities and the general public, and this demand generates income. Certification can benefit career – there is no better way to advance a career than by peer recognition. Certification requires education - to remain certified most programs require some minimum level of continuing education and these opportunities are provided within certification programs.

All of our membership needs to be actively involved in recruitment. The Executive Committee and Headquarters staff has material and presentations available for member recruitment. We have plans to make more presentations and become more visible at other organization, agency, and public meetings.

Education: Education is important, yet we offer so little of it for our membership. We offer conferences and publications. Our conferences are excellent in content educationally, yet very few of our members ever attend. It is true that we attract membership at our conferences, but they are becoming so poorly attended that the effort and results are not worth the substantial effort they require. We are looking into pooling our conferences with other organizations. This year we will co-sponsor a conference on “Severe Storm Prediction and Global Climate Impact” at Rice University, Houston. We hope you might consider participation at this conference. A call for papers is posted on our web page.

Our publications do not reach out. We cannot compete with other journals, and we need to re-evaluate the direction we will go. Our Bulletin/newsletter has become old and stodgy. We now have an on-line and current editorial/bulletin with a new web editor. Most importantly we need to provide education for the fundamentals and practice of hydrology. To do this we need to focus our efforts in the development of study guides for our examinations.

What to do?

We need to have our membership help us in all these tasks. I urge you to contact either myself or our Executive Director, Rolando Bravo and volunteer in some way.

A. Laenen
President, AIH